Rosegarden And Labyrinth A Study In Art Education

This is a story of personal discovery
which led one teacher to a richer and
fuller conception of the job and so'of Me.
It describes a number of actuaiclasses-aiid
how the strange work which sometimes
emerged led to an idea about the power
of certain subjects to evoke a special type
of art. Trying to understand just one of
these led to an investigation of the
history of gardens and later to archae-
ology and the history of ancient religions.
Miss Robertson visited distant parts of
Europe to confront some of the works of
art which excited her interest.

The part which may be played by the
material in the creative process is studied
through the author's own medium, clay,
and descriptions by the makers and
photographs of the work in progress help
to trace the stages of this elusive process.

Poems by the children and adults and
the author herself help to build up the
picture Ox" die Ir^ise ..^ >"-e of
creating, and a more formal studv of the
power of symbols leads on to a discussion
of the relationship of ritualistic art to
ritual in birds and animals, and to the
illumination which biology may throw on
art.

573*5 R6pr 65-21055

Robertson

Eosegarden and labyrinth

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ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

By the same Author

CREATIVE CRAFTS IN EDUCATION

Lovers in a Persian. Garden, showing high walls and central pool.

ROSEGARDEN
AND LABYRINTH

A Study in
Art Education

iy
SEONAID M. ROBERTSON

Foreword by

HERBERT READ

NEW YORK
BARNES & NOBLE, INC.

First published
in the United States of America

Wfy

SeonaidMairi Robertson 196$

"Printed in Great Britain

This act of self-indulgence

is dedicated to

enlightened administrators

in education,

especially
W. R. N. and D. R. C.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY HERBERT READ page xiil

INTRODUCTION XV

PART ONE

I. THE ROSEGARDEN 3

One girl* s phantasy image which posed the problem.

II. THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM 8

The importance of kin-aesthetic images in aiding
imaginative participation in the lives of other
people.

m. EDDIE'S WOMAN 19

^An account of how the material may induce or
modify an image.

IV. HOW THE THEMES EMERGED 26

A.n account of how these and other pulling in-
cidents began to assume a pattern through the work
brought back by student-teachers. The coming to-
gether of the teachers, and an outline of the investi-
gation.

V. THE THEMES THEMSELVES 44

Musing on some of these themes which proved
evocative, and an account of some of the works done
from them.

INTERLUDE: ON GARDENS 63

^4 personal reconnaissance into the theme of
the first model, whose significance was as yet
unexplained.

PART TWO

VI. SYMBOLS 8 I

The necessity of symbolising^ the conditions in which
this kind of activity takes place, and the chaos
which appears to be an essential stage in most
creative work.

vii

CONTENTS

vii. CIRCE'S ISLAND page 95

An account of a day with a group of teachers., and
of the operation of a symbol.

/in. THE TEACHER'S TASK 104

A consideration of what is involved in this kind of
teaching.

INTERLUDE: ON LABYRINTHS in

Another personal reconnaissance in pursuit of the
weaning of the labyrinth.

PART THREE

IX. THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE 139

An account of an excursion with my students, and
of our return.

X. FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS I 54

The scrutiny of some pulling pictures by the chil-
dren which called up echoes of ritualistic art.

XI. RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA AND THE

MEDIUM 1 68

An investigation into where the image comes from
and how it is modified in emergence.

XII. ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH 1 88

A return to these two symbols which have kept re-
curring: their significance in our literature and art
for us and for the children.

APPENDIX i: PHYLLIS'S PROGRESS 196

A norm against which to set the other works.

APPENDIX II : A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE ARTS
OF EARLY MANKIND RELEVANT
TO THIS STUDY. 2O2,

BIBLIOGRAPHY 2O$

INDEX 2 1 1

Vlll

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES IN THE TEXT

1. The Fountain in the walled garden page 77

2. Plan of Margaret's model in

3. Paleolithic goddesses 115

4. Later forms of the goddess 116

5. Abstractions from the form of the goddess 118

6. (a) Steatite plaque, Egyptian 121
(&) Labyrinth on an Early Minoan seal 121
(<r) Middle Minoan seal showing a spiral 121

7. Knossean coins which preserved the labyrinth motif

into Greek times 122

8. Knossean coins with a square labyrinth 123

9. Plan of the Cretan Labyrinth 125
10. Key to Plan 126

PLATES

"Frontispiece

Persian Garden Miniature. Fifteenth century.
National Bibliothek, Vienna.

'Between pages 32 and 33

i. (a) Margaret's rosegarden. () Man and Woman.
2. (a) Candlestick carriage. () Two candlesticks.

(<r) Two pistols.

3. (a) Two Miners. () A Miner Crawling.
4. (a) A Man with Birds. (&) Lovers.

(i) A Miner Pushing Cars.
5. (a) The Sea. () My Family, I. (V) My Family, II.

6. (a] A Wood. () A Forest.

7. (a) Shell Form. () Calyx.

$. (a) Hollow Woman. (#) Hollow Madonna.
(i) Abstract Woman.

ix

ILLUSTRATIONS

Between pages 48 and 49

9. Waterfall drawn with wax.

10. (a) The Great Wave. () Pool with Spray.

ii.(*) Snaky Sea. (If) A Pool.

12. 0) Closed Harbour, (p) Barnsley Park.

13. 00 Stalactite Cave. () Toothed Cave.
14. (a) White Stalactite Cave. (*) Mine Tunnel.

15-00 Dolman Cave. (V) Cradle Cave.
1 6. 00 Silver Stream Cave. (V) Treasure Cave.

"Between pages 64 and 65

17. 00 Lovers in a Garden. French early Fifteenth century. Harley
MS., British Museum. (K) Lovers at a Fountain. Early Sixteenth

century., from a Flemish Calendar. British Museum.

1 8. Christ the Gardener greets Mary Magdalene, circa 1400.

Meister der Hildesheimer. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.

19. Humay meets Humayan in her Garden, circa 1450. Musee des

Arts Decoratifs, Paris.

20 00 Fountain of Youth. Codex de Sphaera. Biblioteca Estense,

Modena. (b) Lover Attains the Rose, circa 1500 from ILomaunt de

la Rose, Harley MS., British Museum.

21. Paradise Garden, circa 1410. Kunstinstitute, Frankfurt/Main.

22. Madonna in a Rosegarden (also called Paradise Garden),
Stefano da Verona. Early Fifteenth century. Museo Civico

Verona (Photo: Mansell Collection}.

23. (a) Annunciation, circa 1440. Fra Angelico. Museo san Marco,
Florence (Photo: Vittorio Alinart). () Dame a la Licorne.
L'Odorat. Sixteenth century. Musee de Cluny, Paris (Photo:
Mansell Collection), (c) Dame a la Licorne. A mon seul Desir.

Musee de Cluny, Paris (Photo: Mansell Collection).

24. Dame a la Licorne. La Vue, Musee de Cluny, Paris (Photo:

Mansell Collection}.

Between pages 160 and 161

25. (a) Child's Figure. (V) Aztec Figure, clay, Precolumbian
America, (c) Child's Mother-Image, (d) Mother Goddess Neo-
lithic, Museo Archaeologico, Rome.

26. Miners.

27. (a) The Seawall. (V) Bull L (c) Bull II.

28. 00 Harvest Festival, (b) Three Kings.

29. 00 The Good Shepherd. Fifth century. Tomb of Galla
Placidia, Ravenna (Photo: Vittorio A.linart). () Justinian mosaic
panel. Sixth century. San Vitale, Ravenna (Photo: Vittorio -Alinart).

ILLUSTRATIONS

30. (a) Movement Model () Whorl Model. (V) The Nose.

(</) Mother and Child Model.

31. Series of five photographs of one model.

32. PhylUYs paintings: (a) People round a Fire. () Oranges on a

Dish. (<r) The Eastern Princess, (d) Self Portrait. (*) The Wise

Old Man of the East.

For reasons given in the text, most of the children's work is in
clay or powder paint. Where this is not so, the medium is given.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

i WISH to express my gratitude to the teachers who took part in
the investigation., many of whom will be surprised to see where it
led; to those whose work is described or illustrated here; to Sylvia
Fairman who helped in the preparation of index; to Elizabeth
McKee and Charity James who did thek best to rescue readers
from my Scotticisms; and to those friends, and in especial Arthur
Justin Greedy, who by discussion stimulated me to turn the next
corner.

Acknowledgement is gratefully made to the following for per-
mission to reproduce photographs: Osterreiche Nationalbibliotek,
Vienna (frontispiece); Trustees of the British Museum (lya, b,
and 20); Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (i8a); Musee des Arts Decoratifs,
Paris (i9a); Biblioteca Estense and Umberto Orlandini, Modena
(2oa); Staatsgalerie Frankfurt (zia); Alinari Fratri, Firenze (25%,
2ga, b); Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques, Paris (z$b,
c); Mansell Collection, London (22, 24); my publishers for per-
mission to use 2oa and Fig. i); Mr. Blackett of the University of
Leeds for photographing many of the children's works.

XII

FOREWORD

THE revolution that has taken place in the teaching of art in
the past half century has perhaps created as many problems
as it has solved. Miss Robertson mentions three "large
questions' in the first paragraph of her book, and she gives some
convincing answers to them in the pages that follow. But she
does not mention the greatest problem of all how to find teachers
with sufficient knowledge of psychology to enable them to guide
the delicate process of integrifiblFtTil^^ the unfolding

of the creative activity in children. Art, she is convinced, has a
social as well as a personal function, for what the individual
creates is not merely an expression or resolution of its own internal
necessities, but above all a mode of communication: a statement
that is intended to have significance for other people, above all
for the ever-expanding circle of the 'other people* within the
child's immediate range of experience. At its minimal significance
art is a signal of distress thrown out by a' lonely and possibly sliip-
wrecked soul; but we learn, the more we study such signals, that
they belong to a universal language of symbols, and that they
come from an individual who represents the collective fears or
fantasies of the human race itself; its affirmations, too, of hope
and joy.

It is precisely at the moment of transition from childhood to
adolescencetha^thege 'signals' acquire an unusual urgency, and
unlessTKey are picked up by sympathetic adults, the psyche of the
child is in danger of shipwreck by which metaphor we mean
some degree of permanent psychic disorder. In this book Miss
Robertson studies with extraordinary sympathy and insight two
such psychic signals or images, and this leads her to a general
discussion (with the experience of other teachers to aid her) of the
significance of the symbolizing activity in children generally. The
investigation ranges widely over the history of symbolism in
art, always returning to the pictures made spontaneously by child-
ren, and to a meditation on the meaning of those two universal

xiii

FOREWORD

archetypes of the rosegatden and the labyrinth which occur so
frequently.

As a whole the book is much more than an analysis of the
significance of children's drawings, and more than one more
urgent plea for the recognition of the importance of art in educa-
tion. It is a work of profound philosophical and indeed spiritual
value, in which the irreducible symbol, the poetic vision itself, is
revealed in all its 'almost eternal durability'. No teacher (and one
would like to say no statesman) can afford to neglect its profound
message.

HERBERT READ

XIV

INTRODUCTION

WHAT place do the visual and tactile arts have in the
education of young people of this scientific age, during
their most sensitive and formative years? Are these arts
linked, in their representational aspect to the arts of poetry and
drama, and in their abstract (or more exactly non-representa-
tional) aspect to music and architecture, more closely than the
school curriculum would suggest, divided as it is into separate
compartments taught after eleven at least by different teachers?
How are these teachers, usually trained in separate colleges, to
develop that heightened awareness to several arts which would
enable them to glimpse the relationships and stir their students'
imagination through any medium which appealed to them?

Such large questions, which are crucial to the development of
the growing generation, need asking now. This study attempts
only to tell how exploring one avenue of teaching the visual arts
within a wider orbit educated the writer through the medium of
educating. 1

The opportunity to pursue this study was given to me first by a
part-time one-year Fellowship, and, after I had returned to my job
of training teachers for some years, by a full-time Senior Research
Fellowship at the Institute of Education, the University of Leeds.
I can only express my gratitude that the appointing committee
should have seen my tentative ideas and intuitions, supported only
by some of the peculiar objects illustrated in this book, as a
possible theme for research.

I had felt for some time that a fair amount of study had gone
into the art of younger children, and the evidence of their
spontaneous painting in a sympathetic atmosphere had been

1 The study of literature and drama, of movement and dance, formed no
part of my own aft education nor my teacher training, and still have no
accepted place in the majority of contemporary courses though they are
now coming to have in the more enlightened.

XV

INTRODUCTION

accumulated, and was available for those who wished to study it.
About adolescents we know much less. Especially we do not
know how far the outer pressure of academic schooling or of a
technological age, the accelerated growth of the rational mind or
some unrecognised change within themselves, modifies the nature
of their art and their attitude to it. I do not pretend to have
investigated all these questions; I explored mainly one aspect of
adolescent art and some work of untaught adults which seemed
closely related to it, I chose this field because, among the schools
of thought on what to do with adolescent classes 'drawing
from observation', 'useful crafts instead of childish painting 5 ,
'abstract art because it is of our time', c a basic course because it
lays the foundations' this aspect seemed in danger of being
neglected. There are many gaps, many hints not followed up, and
I wish that I had been able to study more intensively related work
in all of the arts by a number of adolescents. But, since this book
is intended for teachers, that has been sacrificed in the interest of
the school situation. I hope to show how the attempt to under-
stand the significance of certain works led one teacher to a wider
understanding and a deeper appreciation of the sources of images
in any of the arts. If it encourages other teachers to explore, as true
amateurs, in fields bordering on their own, it will have been
doubly justified.

The work described must be seen against the background of art
education in our times, and as arising from one person's limited
viewpoint. This, as it was at that time, I shall try to set down*
Some of it will be very familiar to art teachers who may wish to
skip the rest of this introduction but, because it is so familiar,
perhaps we do not sufficiently examine its implications for the
lives of our pupils.

The 'rosegarden' described in the first chapter appeared to be
very satisfying to the child of eleven who made it, but it did not
communicate much to me though it must have stirred me since
it kept recurring to my mind. Must art communicate? If so, to
whom? Has such a model anything to do with art? Do we expect
what happens in an 'art lesson' at least to aspire to being art?

Though I did not expect children to be artists in any except a
rather special sense of the term, I believed deeply that the experi-
ence of the artist, the experience of creating, was something we must
offer them. I also believed that communicating their ideas and

xvi

INTRODUCTION

feelings was an essential part of education, and that communicat-
ing in form and colour was analogous to communicating in
language but even more direct, and less hampered by the
mundane practical uses which characterise most of our use of
words. So children and adolescents need a language of expression
in art, and helping them progressively towards it I considered
the job of the art teacher.

With a pencil or a crayon in his hand the very young child
scribbles and obviously enjoys the movement as much as the marks
on the paper. It has been recognised that the resulting scribbles
gradually take on a coherent form or consistent relationship of
the parts. Each element in his visual Vocabulary' is denoted by a
formula, often called a 'schema', adopted by the young child or
untaught adult, to represent a class of objects. This the child uses
much as he does a word, sometimes practising it for its own sake,
and producing it every time he wishes to indicate a man, or a
house, or a tree. The first schema for a man or woman (usually
undifferentiated at this stage) is often an oval with two dots for
eyes and extended mouth, with single lines attached for arms and
legs. This schema is soon changed for one which differentiates
head from body, which may now be represented as roughly oval,
square or triangular, to which arms and legs (and eventually)
fingers and feet are added. Then, often abruptly, he adopts another
schema, elaborates that, and discards it in turn. The additions or
elaborations made are not necessarily those which are derived
from acuter visual apprehension, they are not advances towards a
Visual image'. The first intellectual grasp of the fact of fingers
may result in fingers as long as the arm, or 'many' fingers may be
represented as seven or nine, not necessarily the same on both
hands! The schema may be elaborated in a purely decorative way,
as in filling in the whole of a triangular body with non-representa-
tional patterns, or executing the hair with flourishes of curls while
naming a straight-haired person. So the schema first put down
to indicate an idea may also be a shape elaborated for its own
sake.

I have said that his current schema serves every time the child
wants to 'say' with his pencil or brush c a man', or c a tree', or e a
house', but there are of course times when the schema is modified.
Two particular pressures frequently modify it in this way. One is
the emotional importance of this object to the child. Thus, the

R.L. B xvii

INTRODUCTION

mother is nearly always drawn larger than other figures in the
family. This kind of size-importance relationship represents, of
course., a more many-sided truth than the mere Visual representa-
tion' does. It is not a primitive concept which is progressively
outgrown, as is shown by the return to it in Romanesque art after
the relative naturalism of late Greek and Roman art. Among
historical examples which come to mind are the Christ in the
bas-relief of Lazarus' tomb in Chichester cathedral, who towers
above the other characters, and the Virgin carved in Arezzo
cathedral where she is about three times the size of the Wise Man.
There is no doubt that the Italian carvers and mosaicists had
plenty of models of naturalism in Roman relics, so it must have
been their deliberate choice to represent what they felt to be the
true proportion.

The other way in which the schema is modified is shown when
physical sensation (probably a large element in forming the
original schema) is strongly associated with the idea portrayed.
Then part of the body-schema may be enlarged or omitted or
exaggerated as Viktor Lowenfeld has convincingly shown. 1

When the artist or the child delights in the individual quality as
seen in what he depicts more than in the general idea, we may then
speak of it not as a schema but as a visual image. It has that quality
of freshness, the sensuous quality of having been seen by one
individual's eyes, which arrests us. Yet, even 'drawing from
observation' by adolescents looking at the same objects may well
produce results more startlingly different from one another than
'drawing from imagination 5 by young children who are manipulat-
ing schemata,

How fat can we help children to clarify and convey such
images? That young children do make images of experience and
develop a valid language which is both individual and char-
acteristic of their age not a poor attempt at adult art was
argued persuasively by Cizek, and is now generally accepted. In
many if not unfortunately all primary schools., children are
now given suitable materials and encouraged to paint what they
will, and in what way they will. This belief in the validity of
children's art is reflected in the more informal atmosphere of their

1 The Nature of Creative Activity > Kegan Paul, 1939. He gives the example
of the grasping am in 'playing tig* being much lengthened while the unused
arm is shortened or may even be omitted.

xviii

INTRODUCTION

room, in the provision of large paper and big brushes (making
direct painting possible for young children), in the choice of
medium from a wider range, and the recognition of the personal
nature of the art produced. Unfortunately, the essence of this
freedom was too often misinterpreted by those who, without
understanding the positive philosophy behind it, saw the e new art'
as a release from the former unsatisfactory position of trying to
teach art as a technique. These, confused about the teacher's
function, left the children to mess about in a vague self-expression
without guidance in clarifying their ideas, or help in exploring
their medium. Unfortunately too the striking effect of the spon-
taneous productions of young children, the undoubted beauty cff
colour and decorative qualities of their work, resulted in these
same materials and procedures being adopted uncritically by many
teachers of older children. Adolescents proved not to be 'over-
flowing with art', not ready, like young children, to pour out
naive, direct, exciting paintings. When they did so, the powerful
pressures of the adult environment towards the sentimentalised
naturalism of magazine and calendar illustrations, their own
developing self-consciousness, and criticism of the results by their
parents or fellows, often undermined what satisfaction they had
in the experience. Cizek had more faith in the younger children
and was discouraged by the difficulties of teaching older children,
but in the nineteen-thirties Marion Richardson, whose warmth of
personality and great concern for the children inspired all who
worked with her, surprised educationists by revealing something
of what might be achieved with adolescents.

Marion Richardson isolated the factor of pattern and explored
its relationship to writing which, along with other influences, has
resulted in a revolution in the attitude to handwriting in schools. 1
She also developed and handed on to her teachers* classes a
method of intensifying visual imagery, and, by her own beautiful
and precisely detailed descriptions of the scenes they should paint,
stimulated her girls to make pictures with a subtlety of colour and
range of surface texture which had hardly been known before. I
would, however, question whether it was not the teacher's artistry,
her seizure of a viewpoint on a paintable scene and her selection

1 Recently, the flow of pattern in writing and the preservation of legibility
at speed have been more fully studied by Alfred Fairbank and Charlotte
Stone and presented in their books on simplified Italic.

xix

INTRODUCTION

of visual detail rather than the children's which are shown in those
well-known paintings from verbal description. 1

Such changes in thought about art education could be accepted
because they were in accord with the changes in educational
thought of the period. By the second quarter of the twentieth
century, general ideas on education which go back to Pestalozzi
and Froebel and even to Rousseau (apart from their ideas on art
education which were all strangely out of line with their general
philosophies) began to filter through and, alongside the investi-
gations of such progressive educators as Dewey and Caldwell
Cook, created an atmosphere within which art education could
flourish* Public opinion on what constituted c arf was widened
by the interest of artists in the Negro art brought back by anthro-
pologists, and the Bronze age and Neolithic excavations of
archaeologists. The Post-Impressionist painters, who gradually
became accepted, extended public interest in the variety of
aesthetic experience. The revolt of a number of gifted teachers
against a narrow conception of art education as teaching tech-
niques resulted in a break-through to a wider range of adolescent
art. However, many well-meaning but confused teachers con-
tinued to look for the sort of work which came naturally to young
children, instead of extending the experience of adolescents in
ways appropriate to their own stage of development. In secondary
schools the churning out of 'decorative compositions' on abstract
themes, e.g. Power, Music, or of remote and so supposedly
'imaginative' subjects, e.g. Life on Other Plaaets, Under the Sea,
were a symptom of the malaise.

Understandably, there has been a counter-revolution, or rather
several. On the one hand, some teachers have complained that art
education is out of touch with life in the twentieth century, and
have thought they were coming to terms with their environment
either by a swing towards semi-technical studies of motor-cars
and aeroplanes (in which the expressive element essential to art
is cut to a minimum) or by a course on 'commercial art' such as
posters, showcards, and arranging shop-windows. This leads to
a slick advertising style and to concentration on the artificialities
of inflated needs created by clever advertising. 2 Is this really the

1 M. Richardson, Art and the Child, U.L.P., 1948.

2 Much mote interesting would be a critical survey of the idealised images
used by advertisers and the basis of their wide appeal as is dpne by enlight-

INTRODUCTION

attitude of mind we wish to encourage in adolescents? Surely such
ways of coming to terms with the environment are at a level too
superficial to be worth discussion.

A more genuine counter-revolution has come from some of the
most painterly among art educationists. Deeply concerned about
the quantities of sloppy and so-called 'imaginative' work in secon-
dary schools, they have encouraged a whole-hearted return to
work from observation and a careful study of the environment.
While this is admirable, they have often, I think, in a wholesome
revolt against slovenly self-expression, put too great an emphasis
on the pro ^ ducts, the drawings or paintings themselves, rather than
on the quality of the experience the children are having, and the
great numbers of children's art exhibitions are also a symptom
of this emphasis. I believe that while such studies from observa-
tion have a great place in adolescent education, they are not an
end in themselves. I suspect an extreme reliance on drawing from
observation is related to a sense of insecurity in the teacher: the
visible appearance of things is something stable to hang on to.
Moreover the teacher has a greater skill in the rendering of visible
appearances and so there is no doubt that he is superior in this
and can teach the child. It may spring from a sincere need to be
of use, and a lack of the faith necessary to stand aside at certain
times. I would suggest that, however valuable any teacher's
knowledge and skill may be, to rely on that as the main basis of
his relationship with his pupils is to avoid the fundamental core
of any fruitful relationship between human beings, the reverence
of the unique soul in one anothef.

There is another school of thought which has gone so far as to
say in effect, 'The only thing we can teach children is technique,
so let us concentrate on the basic studies of form, colour mixing,
tone, et cetera, which are the grammar of our art, and leave feel-
ings and imagination out of it/ Such a point of view brings a
much-needed discipline to the training of young professionals of
all kinds in art schools, and may form some part of the serious
study of art by adolescents, but it has unfortunately been elevated
almost to a religion by some of its adherents. This is no more the
whole answer to adolescent art than is working from observation,

ened teachets of English o Sociology, so long as it was in addition to
practical work.

xxi

INTRODUCTION

and moreover it leads to a dichotomy between technique and
what the technique is developed to say, between language and
content, which militates against that 'whole' education for which
we search. The acceptance of such a narrow limitation for the
'ordinary' adolescent must depend on whether we see our job
as to instruct or to educate.

I have never seen the acquisition of one more technique
(especially one which is of precious little practical use to most
adults) as of any value except in so far as it enables a person to
convey the significance of experience when a moment of illumina-
tion comes. Emotions are clarified for ourselves and communi-
cated to others through the expression of them, and personal
techniques are hammered out in the painful process of wrestling
with this attempt to clarify. But such moments of fresh vision,
which may be the daily experience of the young child with 'the
innocent eye', come less often to adolescents and adults and so
are even more precious when they come.

Therefore, I see the actual work to be done in the art 'lesson'
as an alternation between the expression of direct spontaneous
feeling (when this is aroused by some incident in life outside
the art room, or by the deliberate presentation of something
within it calculated to surprise or delight) with 'studies', more
objective, deliberately undertaken exercises to explore the possi-
bilities of the medium, to perfect some technique of representa-
tion, or to become familiar with the workings of nature in a more
analytical way, for instance how bodies are articulated, how trees
grow, how crystals are structured. Since this book is concerned
with class teaching, it is necessary to remind ourselves that this
alternation would ideally, of course, take place in a different cycle
for each child. One will be bursting with something to say at the
moment when another is heavy and uninspired. Not even children
can guarantee to be creative at 11.25 every Thursday morning.
This is, of course, a strong argument for having a large enough
art room open at all possible hours, with a reasonable degree of
independence for adolescents in the use of their time. Those who
have benefited from such an arrangement can vouch for its releas-
ing and balancing effect both on the highly pressurised life of
grammar schools and on the bored near-delinquent. But since in
general we do teach whole forms, and we work within a timetable,
the best that can be done is to encourage opting out of the class

xxii

INTRODUCTION

activity when that conflicts too strongly with a personal urge.
All this is not, of course, to suggest that the careful study of a
bare twig or the making of a useful pot cannot be "creative', or
that one mood cannot turn into the other while one is working.
But there certainly are different moods which occur in different
rhythms for each person.

If this is accepted by teacher and pupils then the studies, the
techniques to be learned (which are part of art education as much
as of any other discipline) will be seen, not as skills to be mastered
for their own sake, but as contributing to the act of creation.
When, in a moment of vision, an object or an experience is
illuminated with significance, not only the innate sensibility but
the acquired skill must bear upon the experience to clarify and
communicate it. Surely it is for this that the disciplines have been
undergone, the techniques practised in less inspired moments!
A child or an adult is no better a human being and contributes
nothing to the common good if he can paint but has nothing to
say in his painting. What he says should be a personal statement
Ms own representation of his own experience not *a good paint-
ing' in terms of any particular school of educational thought. His
personal involvement and responsibility for his own statement
is one of the most important contributions of the arts to the whole
of education. Admittedly, what he says is not likely to be original
and creative in the sense of expanding the frontiers of human
understanding as do the great artists. But though his painting is
individual, it is not in isolation. Only through a sincere study of
the masters (both old and contemporary) as people doing the
same sort of thing as himself, only far far better, who show the
variety, the flexibility, the potency of the languages of painting
to fix an image, and convey an experience only through this will
he grow from childhood to manhood in art, with expression and
appreciation interweaving. So can a child and an adolescent grow
into his own culture and root his present in its past. This much
about creative work I understood, I think, when this book begins,
but I did not know how far back these roots might reach or how
rich was that compost of ages which may fertilise his growth.

xxin

PART ONE

IN part one I first describe three apparently isolated incidents, illustra-
tive of those which originally drew my attention to the questions which
this book explores. It happens that these all describe modelling classes
for children and adolescents reveal themselves very clearly in this
medium but much of the material on which this book is based is
painting, while poems and dance-dramas are also slightly drawn on.
The retelling of these incidents is followed by a description of the way
in which, from hints and intuitions, a vague idea emerged and was
tested out with the co-operation of a group of teachers.

The reader is asked to bear with me in retracing this roundabout
approach. It would be natural in a book on education, to expect to
understand the significance of each incident as one went along. Here,
I invite the reader to follow the route by which the significance of each
incident only gradually became apparent to me, and I have no doubt
that I have not seen the half of it yet.

CHAPTER ONE
THE ROSEGARDEN

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

Dry Salvages, T. s. ELIOT

O, LOVELY squelchy stuff, lovely squelchy stuff!' One of the
eleven-year-old boys was standing blindfold at his desk,
his hair standing on end where he had swept a clayey
comb of fingers through it, intoning this to himself as he picked
up handfuls of soft clay and squeezed it through his fingers in long
gobbets, time after time. He made nothing the whole lesson and
when at the end he uncovered his eyes he cheerfully surveyed the
mass of clay eels on his desk with a surprised grin. This did not
worry me at all, so he was able to enjoy his fun. Apart from all
kinds of other satisfactions, this boy had reached the first pre-
requisite of the artist the positive enjoyment of his material.

One little girl, faced with clay for the first time that day, had
moaned at the sight of it, *O, I don't want to touch it, horrid stuff,
I shall get dirty, I'm sure I shall get dirty'. I persuaded her to put
on her pinafore and told her she could easily wash her hands after-
wards, promising her that if she did not enjoy it she need never
use clay again. Then I tied the bandage round her eyes and taking
her hand in mine, gently laid it on the grapefruit-sized ball of clay
which I had put in front of her, and left her alone with it.

This was my first meeting with those thirty youngsters, 1 and I
had brought along quantities of plastic clay and large handker-
chiefs (to cover their eyes) for this first occasion. I had quietened
the group who were bubbling over with engaging excitement at
the prospect of using clay, and told them to blindfold themselves.

So with a great deal of chatter the boys and girls tied on their

1 These were boys and girls of eleven to twelve in whose school I had
been invited to take a few sessions of clay work.

3

THE ROSEGARDEN

own and one another's bandages. There were some who, during
this manoeuvre, managed to find their way to a completely different
part of the room and had to be led back to their own desks and a
few who were convulsed with laughter at the sight of their friends
so bandaged. After a few moments I managed to see that each
child was quietly settled at his own place and I suggested that they
should start. 'You need not think about something to make/ I
said. 'Here is a piece of clay and youVe never had the opportunity
to play with clay before. Just get to know this piece of clay; push
your fingers into it, pull them out, thump it, bang it, roll it, if
you like discover what it will do and what it won't do. If you
push your finger far it will go right through; if you pull the clay
out in your hand it will eventually break, and if you want to go
on just exploring and enjoying the clay itself for the whole lesson,
that's quite all right. You don't need to make anything, and if you
do make something you can squash it up again and make some-
thing else. But if you find that, as you feel the shape you are
making beneath your hands, an idea comes to you of what it
might be, then perhaps you would like to bring out that idea a
little more, to shape it into the form of the thing that is in your
mind. There is more clay at your right-hand side which you can
feel for and I shall come round and see what you are doing. Do
not worry about the other people in the room perhaps you can
imagine that you are quite alone with this piece of clay. So it
would be a good idea if we were all very quiet. At the end of the
lesson we will take off our bandages.'

I myself would hardly have believed the way in which the burble
of excitement died down in a few moments. First of all the bright
eyes of the children, which were what had particularly struck me
about this new class, disappeared beneath their bandages, and then
the excited jigging limbs, the hands constantly thrust up to attract
my attention and the feet that hammered on the floor or kicked at
the desks in childish desire for movement were all stilled. The
whole activity in each of those little bodies became concentrated
in the hands those hands which were pushing and pulling and
forming the formless lumps of cky in front of them. I was in-
tensely interested in their very first movement and wished that I
had a hundred eyes to see what was going on in every corner of
the room. One of the most unexpected things was the great
number of pillar shapes pulled up from the lumps and later

4

THE ROSEGARDEN

elaborated with 'decorations*. I could not watch at the same time
the transformation of every one of these and could only in a few
instances follow their change into lighthouses, into candlesticks
(Illus. 2a, b), into pistols (Illus. 2c). At the end of this lesson
there were more recognisable lighthouses than any other single
object.

I watched the little girl who had moaned about getting dirty
and at first she laid one single and tentative finger cautiously on
the clay, clutching her thumb and other fingers in her palm and
holding her left hand clenched in her lap. After a few tentative
pats or strokes with the tip of her finger she drew back and
shuddered a little. Then the clay drew her again, and the same
pink index finger, with its smooth soft nail, crept out and this
time pushed at the ball of clay, making an imprint in it. After a
momentary shiver she pushed that fingerfurther and made a hollow
in which she slowly twisted her finger, then again she quickly with-
drew it and clenched her hand to her chest; however, the other
hand came slowly up from her lap and then with two fore-fingers
(but with the other fingers still curled in her palm) she started
again to pat and press and eventually to poke the surface. For the
whole of that lesson she could not give herself up to the clay, she
could only push a finger at it and then hastily withdraw as though
attracted while being afraid of the attraction. She had made noth-
ing by the end of the time and still sat with her ball in front of
her only modified by those pierced hollows and proddings
which were all she had allowed herself. However, at the end, I just
smiled at her and pointed out reassuringly that her overall was
still quite clean and sent her among the first group to wash her
hands. 1

I 1 did not yet know whether she would refuse to use the clay next week,
a feeling I had promised to respect, and I had quite anticipated that even
though she did not refuse it, I might have to use a certain amount of per-
suasion to get her to make anything with it. In fact the next week as I drove
my van up to the front door the children were out enjoying their play-
time in the courtyard. To my astonishment this little girl detached herself
from her friends and came flying across the asphalt to me, saying, as she
helped me to open the back-doors of the van, 'Are we going to use clay
again this week?, eyes shining and cheeks bulging with the stretch of her
smile. Something seemed to have happened in the meantime. Perhaps just
the fact that her tentative playing with clay had brought no dire results
from any quarter overcame her inhibitions so that she could dare to enjoy

5

THE ROSEGARDEN

As I walked quietly about the room I tried not to disturb the
children in their absorption, but murmured occasionally, 'That's
fine!' or It's lovely stuff to feel, isn't it?' or I left alone some whose
whole movements expressed intense concentration. Then I saw,
towards the end of the lesson, one little girl working by herself in
a corner of the room almost with her back to the rest of the class.
She was laying out on her desk by touch, a string of 'sausages' of
clay, which she rolled and placed with great devotion, feeling their
position in relation to one another. When I saw her at work she
had completed one oval of such sausages and was making another
inside it. She seemed to be working to some intense inner dicta-
tion so, not wanting to disturb her, I waited until the end of the
session and went back to discuss her work with her when the
others were clearing up. Inside the inner oval she had placed three
upright pillars, of which the middle one was larger, more squat,
and hung with fruitlike appendages. When, a little later than most
of the children she took the bandage from her eyes, she looked at
her work for a few moments, then ran to the front of the room
where I had provided a bag of white powdered flint to dry up the
clay which was a little too damp on this occasion. She came back
with a handful of this and, laughing, scattered it over the pillars
(Dlus. i).

Looking at this curious arrangement of sausages so laid out,
which conveyed nothing to me, and might so easily have been
swept up and put back in the bin as no sort of achievement to
keep, I asked her what it was she had made. A superficial glance
would have suggested it was the work of a lasy child or one of low
intelligence. It's a rosegarden,' she said, only letting her eyes
glance at me before they were brought back to her model. 'It's a
rosegarden and this is the wall round it. You come in here/ she
indicated an opening in the outer wall with her finger. 'But you
cannot get into the garden. You have to come round that way'
(between the outer and the inner wall), 'and then you come into
the garden this way.' The opening of the inner oval was at the
opposite side to the outer one and now, with her forefinger, she

it. That week she attacked her ball of clay in a completely different way> and
though she was always one of those who early seized on an intelligible idea
and gave Herself assurance by working on that, she did, I think, find a
material responsive to her handling, and courage to widen her experience.

6

THE ROSEGARDEN

traced the path into the inner garden. 'And here/ she said, 'there
are fountains/ and again she lifted a little of the white powdered
flint, and scattered it perhaps as the drops of water might fall
from the fountains? 'There are fountains and there are flowers and
rose-trees and lovely smells.' The contrast between the barely
formed pieces of clay lying on the desk and the vision which was
obviously in her mind, this contrast was so great that I knew I was
in the presence of something very puzzling. Here was anintelligent
twelve-year-old who was capable of drawing a reasonable picture,
of representing the visual appearance of the world to a normal
extent, obviously happy and satisfied for a whole session in the
experience of placing together two ovals and three pillars of clay.
This was no instance of compensating for inadequate skill of the
hands by dressing it up in skill with words. I later discovered that
this little girl could model reasonably realistically, but today there
was a dreamy inturned expression in her eyes, as, with great satis-
faction, if a hint of reserve, she murmured to me 'This is a rose-
garden/

I managed to preserve the 'rosegarden' by telling her that the
others had all cleared away and that she also must go now and
wash her hands. So I was able to photograph it. I knew I was in
the presence of something strange which must be explored, but
how to set about it I did not know, so in the need to get on with
the business of teaching and of everyday living, I did nothing.

CHAPTER TWO
THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

The mystery of the hole the mysterious fascination of caves in hillsides
and cliffs.

From 'Notes on Sculpture' Henry Moore in The Painter's Object.
Ed. Myfanwy Piper.

THE contrasting group of which I now write were boys in a
secondary modern school in a rather decrepit building in
one of the uglier mining areas of the West Riding, where
the lads were tough and truculent in their Yorkshire independ-
ence. 1 Lacking pocket-money they found weekend playgrounds
in the cindery wastes and foul pools around the tips, and gratis
amusements in lounging outside the smelly pubs or staring at the
vulgar posters outside the cinemas. I was invited to teach in this
school once a week, and the class I faced that first day were
fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds, several of whom would be working
men very soon. Most of them were restive and contemptuous of
school, longing for independence and the dignity of bringing
home a pay packet. They were unused to a woman teacher. I
wondered what I had taken on.

However, when I saw the thirty-odd youngsters gathered in the
room, some rough, some slinky with plastered hair, some weedy
looking with blue-tinged faces, almost all in clothes neglected by
overworked mothers, I reminded myself how restricted their
sense experiences had been in these bleak surroundings, and I was
filled with confidence in the clay to give them an experience they
might otherwise miss.

The craft master in the school gave me the utmost co-operation
the use of the clay, complete freedom with the room, which was

1 1 had at this time taught for several years in girls' schools and in a mixed
training college and deliberately chose this school to refresh my teaching as
one of the toughest in which our students practised.

8

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

furnished with tough tables and chairs, and the feeling of being
welcomed by him. He seldom put in an appearance during my
lessons but he was always interested in the boys' products. They
had a good tradition of pottery in the school, but this form had
not done much modelling, which was the work I proposed to take
with them. I gathered them round one of the big tables, sitting on
stools, or perched on one another's knees, until we were all close
enough to talk in an informal fashion. Telling them briefly how I
had come to be a potter, I asked them about what they were going
to do when they left school which for some of them would be in
a few weeks. As coal-mining was the predominant local industry
most of them took it for granted that they would go *doon t'pit',
although some admitted that their mothers didn't want them to.
When I asked why their mothers objected, among the chorus of
'It's dirty', and 'Me mum wants me to have a job you don't get so
wore-out, like' came also the sombre stories of pit accidents. One
boy had had an uncle killed, many had had brothers or fathers
injured in the pits, and in that first ten minutes with them I sensed
another sort of life from that I had known, a life over-shadowed,
not only by the heavy grey skies which the soot and dirt suspended
over the town, but by this threat in the background. Yet the
inevitability of working down the pit shut them within this
cultural waste as the circle of pit-tips blocked every vista of the
streets.

Nevertheless, this sombre side emerged only occasionally in
such discussions, and on the whole they took it for granted and
got on with their lives like other adolescents. I suggested that on
this morning we should all model a miner. I also told them, as I do
with almost every class, that whatever subject for a picture or
model I put to them was only a suggestion and if they felt strongly
against using it, or if they had some other idea crying out to be
expressed, they should never feel themselves forced to work on
the subject given. This proviso is I think, essential, and it has often
proved very interesting to watch which subjects certain boys, or
the majority of a class, opted out of. It has also proved just as
illuminating to see what subjects they chose to do when they did
make the definite decision to work on one of their own choice.
On this day nobody opted out; everyone modelled a miner or some
aspect of mining.

I asked them whether any of them had ever been down a mine,

R.L. C 9

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

but none had, nor had I at that time but they had heard exact
descriptions from their fathers and brothers. They described what
they thought it would be like when they finally went down there;
they spoke chiefly of the darkness, the confined space and the
feeling of the whole earth over one's head. It would obviously
have been much better if I could have gone with those boys down
a mine, as indeed I did later with my own students, 1 but since it
was not feasible on that occasion I proposed to them that we
should build ourselves a mock mine in the classroom and give
ourselves up imaginatively to the experience. They thought this
rather peculiar, but after agreeing to humour me, they set about
it with a will. So we darkened the windows so far as we were able.
We constructed a kind of tunnel in the classroom, starting by
putting the large tables together end to end, leading through to
the chairs all set end to end, and then the stools so that our con-
struction narrowed in the final part. We made the tunnel wind
about the room and turn round corners, and we hung the sides
with a collection of coats and waterproof table-covers to get the
feeling of darkness and constriction. Just before we started to
crawl through the tunnel one hitherto silent boy pointed out that
the miner usually carries his pick over his shoulder down the mine
and this seemed an authentic addition. So we all searched about
the room for something to represent a pick a broom-handle, a
long piece of wood, a hammer or something of the sort, and
imagining we had just come out of the down shaft, we filed into
the 'mine'. I did wonder if this would seem rather childish play to
those boys of fourteen, but as soon as we started off through our
constructed tunnel we all became so absorbed in our physical
sensations that these at least were intensely real. One became
acutely aware of angles, of the angles of one's elbows and one's
wrists and one's knees in the effort to avoid knocking them against
the legs of the tables and chairs. One's forehead became like that
of a caterpillar, the forward-pushing part of oneself which must
take all the bumps and knocks. It was fairly dark in the tunnel
and we had to feel our way along and round the corners and meet
obstructions such as crossbars with our doubled-up knees. We
crawled very closely, one behind the other, the last boys tumbling
to get in and hustling the others on, so that one was always
afraid of kicking the face of the boy behind or being kicked by
1 An account of this is given in *The Visit to a Goal-nune*.

10

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

the one in front. I found then how very much more difficult it is
to crawl carrying a pick-axe; it is a relatively easy thing to crawl
on hands and knees across the floor, but on one hand and knees it
is a different matter. The pressure on every bony part seems more
than doubled. Progress was rather slow through the labyrinthine
construction and I was acutely conscious of the unprotected
protuberances of my knee-caps. My shoulders became stiff, so I
thought it would be a relief to change hands and tried to transfer
the e pick-axe' an old mallet for wood-carving to my other
shoulder, but I found it impossible in the restricted space, and the
boy behind me was pushing and breathing and muttering, so I
had to press on. It seemed a surprisingly long journey round that
dark classroom and when I finally emerged at the end of the tunnel
it was an intense relief to stand up and stretch; as the boys tumbled
out one after another they lunged into a vacant spot and stretched
themselves in real enjoyment of the space.

At this point there occurred an incident which endeared those
boys to me on this my first meeting with them. I had brought an
overall for this clay lesson but in order to make a good appearance
on my first day at the school I had put on my best nylon stockings.
At the moment before I started to lead them through the tunnel I
became aware of the foolhardiness of this but since there was
nowhere to slip away and take them off, I ruefully took my nylons
through the tunnel with me. When we emerged and I was look-
ing at the ladders running down from each knee, the boys also
noticed and gathered round me with anxious solicitation. c Oh,
what a shame, Miss.' 'You can't do nothing about mending that,
Miss, it's too far gone/ they exclaimed. They knew from their
experience at home with sisters and mothers how it might sap
self-confidence and ruin a date to be without a pair of perfect
nylons.

However, I was anxious for them to hold the image of their
recent experience in their minds, and so we hastily stripped the
coats and covers off the tunnel, righted the chairs, and with an
enormous double-fistful of clay each settled down at a table. At
this point I said nothing to them except, *Now let us model what
it felt like to crawl through the tunnel. Do you remember where
it hurt? How cramped we were? Think yourself back into the
experience and from that imagine the closeness and darkness of a
real mine, and model a miner at work,' Silence immediately shut

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

down on the group and everyone started modelling. Most of the
boys chose to model a miner crawling on his hands and knees, but
one or two showed the miner hacking at the coal-face. Almost all
the models had an extraordinarily earthy sturdiness. (Illus. 3 a, b).

After remaining in the background for the first ten minutes to
let them become absorbed in what they were doing, I started
quietly going round. Without being 'correct* in proportion or
finished in detail they were truly clay representations of our
experience. To look at them recalled bodily the constricted move-
ments. The figures usually showed very large hands and feet, and
shoulder muscles, of which we became acutely aware, were pro-
minent. These boys would see their fathers stripped for bathing
at home, and there was nothing of the idealised he-man in what
they modelled. Many of the figures had a curious look of a blind
burrowing animal about them. I began to ponder the effect of
mining on miners: whether in expecting men to go down into
the earth to get coal for us, we are asking them to become less
than men. It is a known fact 1 that mining towns produce a very
harsh type of patriarchal society might this be due not only to
economic factors but to the need for men who have felt at the
mercy of their environment when at work to dominate powerfully
at home?

On my way round I paused to talk to Bert whose miner was a
beetle-like creature with a small flat face emerging from a huge
body, one little hand thrust out in front feeling its way. Most of
the boys had represented the great heavy clogs the miners wear
and had, if anything, exaggerated the feet in their consciousness
of the morning tramp of miner's boots. But Bert's little figure was
heavy and sturdy in the shoulders, thighs and knees, and then the
legs tapered away to small insignificant feet, almost without a
representation of the heel. Before I had realised what I was doing
I said, 'Bert, haven't you ever looked at anyone's feet? Legs don't
just taper away to a point like that. There is a heel, a right angle,
which we have developed to stand on and which we lift from the
ground as we walk.' He lifted his eyes from the model and looked
up at my face with an almost dazed, unfocussed look, still sunk in
what he was doing. Into his absorption, in which for the moment
no one else existed, I had intruded. Instantaneously I realised my

1 This emerges clearly from a sociological study of a town close to this
school. Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, Coal is Our Life.

12

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

mistake. I was standing above him and in that moment of realisa-
tion I had dropped instinctively on to my haunches beside him.
I suggested that we should both try on our hands and knees to
feel once more the position he had chosen to represent. Bert
'came to' slowly, parked his spare clay, and we both crouched on
the floor at the side of the table on our hands and knees. For a
moment we gave ourselves up to recapturing in our bodies the
image of our progress through the tunnel. Then meeting his eyes
level with mine that foot or two above the floor, I could only nod
my head humbly at him and say, 'Yes, I see what you mean/ For
the extraordinary thing was that when I got back into that
position and tried to feel the length and shape of my leg instead of
looking at it, I was almost unaware of my heels. Sensation followed
the tensed muscles of the leg and the tactile sensation of the skin
of the foot arch pressed on the floor, but I was not conscious of
having heels unless I thought about them. 'Yes,' I said, as we rose
from the floor, *I see what you mean, you are perfectly right,*
and fortunately Bert settled down at his work again, I hope only a
little the worse for my interruption. For I had been, of course,
completely in the wrong. In asking those boys to crawl through
the tunnel with me, I had deliberately cut out as much light as
possible so that we would not be relying, as we usually are, so
much on visual &s on kinaesthetic sensations, those feelings of being
crowded in a narrow space, of being bumped by jutting promi-
nences, or feeling one's bodily movements within a very re-
stricted alley. Bert had, in fact, offered a representation of just
this experience and here I was asking him if he had looked\ I was
shocked into being more patient and more cautious before I made
a comment to any of the other boys. I tried to take to heart again
my own advice to my students, to wait until, by observation and
perhaps questioning, they had felt their way into what aspect a
child was trying to represent, before they commented or criticised.
We have to lie down, as it were, beside the child and take his
point of view'before we can say anything helpful.* '" ' * - - -
"*T Ra3 been so Interested and so absorbed m the miners which
were all round me that I had not noticed that at the other end of
the room two boys were working on something rather different.
When I made my way to them I found that after the others had
taken as much clay as they wanted from the claybin these two
had helped themselves to all that was left. On the end table they

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

had piled this huge mountain of clay with which they were con-
structing, they said, a mine. The great heap was riddled with
tunnels which went in at one point, turned corners ^and emerged
somewhere else, crossing and doubling back, sometimes dividing
into two. The clay was pitted with the hollows thrust by a
prodding finger, but when I came up to them, these two were
thrusting their arms up to the elbow into the bigger tunnels,
feeling their way forward with the clenched knuckles of one hand
and withdrawing their arms again from the clinging clay which
made a sucking noise. The blissful content on their faces as they
pushed into the hollows, their independent silent play on opposite
sides of their clay mountain and yet their acceptance of ^each
other's presence and each other's pleasure in the same activity,
was very thought-provoking. Their intense satisfaction and en-
joyment in the simple act of thrusting in and pulling out of one
orifice after another is something that I shall never forget.

If I were asked to justify the device of the mine in the classroom,
I would say first that the basis of all art lies in sensation, but that
the kinaesthetic and tactile sensations which are the foundation for
making or enjoying sculpture, pottery and many other crafts, is
sadly neglected in a predominantly visual, aural and intellectual
education. Since I was going to take this group for modelling and
pottery I wanted to establish this basis from the beginning, and I
deliberately made an effort to isolate and emphasise bodily sensa-
tions by darkening the room, by using less familiar muscles, by

an imaginative heightening of the situation. As for the precise
choice of subject for these boys, I wanted on my first day to meet
them on ground where they were at an advantage, where I must
listen respectfully and sympathetically to their tales of the mines
and share in the anticipation of their future jobs.

The next week we were mountaineers, stretching and reaching
up to grasp. We climbed on one another's shoulders, we hung
on to any firm projections we could find. We talked about
Everest and .about why men climb mountains. Although this
ptovideZ ^an extreme ' 'cbfittastT' 6F * the' physical sensations
stretching, reaching, staring upwards, after creeping, crawling,
crouching downwards and gave to such common expressions as
'reaching after proof and "burrowing for facts' the new vividness
of bodily sensation, I found that this was not such a good subject
for modelling. It lost too much through lack of colour and width

14

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

of space, and was much more satisfying when worked out in
paffiffiig.*

So far, the models had usually consisted of one figure with which
the boy, by this approach, was induced to identify himself. Because
of the degree of abstraction needed to represent even the simplest
three-dimensional form on a flat surface, it is easier to be objective
in drawing, and being objective is of course another necessary
facet of art education. But for the many weeks when we pursued
this more subjective approach (without necessarily 'going through
the motions' as a group every time), they had realised that if you
take up the physical attitude of the character you are 'feeling
yourself into', you are likely to get a fuller realisation of his situa-
tion. From then on boys, as well as asking their friends to pose
briefly for them while working on a model, could be seen un-
obtrusively getting themselves into all kinds of queer positions,
'to know it from inside' as one said. Where one teacher can teach
movement or dance and drama as well as art, as is more possible
with primary class teachers, such interaction between one and the
other is very natural. Many of my students who have gone in for
secondary teaching have also managed to follow through themes
in several different arts in this way, each contributing to expression
in the other. Since this particular line of development was not
open to me with this particular class of boys, I went on instead to
explore the relationships of groups of figures using eyes as well as
haptic sensibilities. 2

Miners' families are keen keepers of pets, and when these were

1 When I suggested mountains later as a painting theme, I noticed that
mountains were then always represented from a distance, and often fantasti-
cally peaked. It was the idea of the unattainable, not any actual incident of
climbing, which was chosen.

2 A description of the complete reliance on touch and haptic sense is given
in an article on 'Blindfold Modelling', New Era, 1954.

I had for as long as I can remember been aware that emotions may be
expressed by certain attitudes I suppose a child early learns to interpret
the postures and gestures of others for its own protection. But it was
something of a shock when I first consciously recognised the converse
that emotions can be evoked by movements and postures, and this was
largely through coming to know Rudolf Laban and his students. I recog-
nised that, just as marching and drilling could be used to evoke one kind
of emotion in the participants, and dancing together a different kind, so
adopting an upright posture and bold step could help me to get over
nervousness "before entering a room or mounting a lecture platform.

15

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

welcomed at school they proved fascinating models for drawing:
hamsters, tortoises, greyhounds, goats. I used this interest to
bridge the chasm between the single-figure and double-figure
models. The boys told me about their pets, so we talked of animals
and of the differing relationships of men to animals; of hunting
them (with reproductions of cave paintings to look at), of taming
them for milking and breeding, remembering the pastoral Old
Testament stories, and then of the harnessing of animals to help
in agriculture. I remember telling them one day, as we did the
more mechanical work of preparing the clay, about Briffault's
theories of the change in these earliest societies in the status of
men and women resulting from this. 1 He believed that the early
communities were matriarchal, closely attached to one spot, the
women owning and largely working the land, the husbands going
to join and live with their wives on marriage rather than the other
way round. But the domestication of herds, entailing grazing
circuits, was men's province, had put economic power in the
hands of the men, who, moreover, then wandered off taking their
wives with them, as Jacob took Rachel and Leah, and so gradually
a patriarchal society became more general. Where, however, agri-
culture had developed on an important scale into historical times
without an intervening pastoral stage, the matriarchal set-up has
been reinforced and survives strongly in some primitive societies
which the boys themselves knew from films or television. As well
as entertaining us through the less creative stages of clay-work,
perhaps Briffault's ideas would suggest to this generation in flux
that the extreme patriarchy they experienced in their own homes
was not the only possible form of human society.

So they modelled 'men with animals* in whatever relationship
they chose: men fighting tigers, breaking-in horses, milking goats,
nursing cats or fondling those pigeons (Illus. 4a) which are the
commonest associates of miners and perhaps represent a freedom
which they, more than most of us, are denied

winging wildly across the white

orchards and dark-green fields; on on on and out of sight. 2

In these models they explored the ideas of various relationships
expressed in the stance of man and animal. This led on to the

1 Briflfault, The Mothers, vol. II, p. 251, Allen and Unwin, 1927.

2 S. Sassoon, Collected Poems, p. 124, Faber, 1947.

16

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

two-figure groups which were made next boys wrestling, grand-
father dandling a baby, the lovers shown in Illustration 4b, a
model which though made quickly by a loutish boy out of the
coarsest brickwork clay, is yet tender and delicate in feeling. When
we came on to the technically much more difficult problems of
relating three or more figures in a model, I got led away, I re-
member, into talking about the sudden opening of fresh possi-
bilities in Greek drama when the third actor was introduced, but
they kept me down to earth, discussing the difficult situations
which do arise when three friends or three in a family are together,
and all the myriad ways in which they may react to one another.
Their models revealed and fixed in telling form some of these
situations and attitudes: the rejection by a pair of the third person;
awareness by two of the presence of the third which somehow
forbids pairing off and holds all three in uneasy congress; the glad
acceptance of the third, perhaps in veneration as seen in one
boy's model of two small children at their grandfather's chair or
protectively, as in the Henry Moore family groups which some
of them knew, since he was born near here. Consideration of these
models interwove with discussion of the complex ties which exist
between three people. The resulting image arises not only from
the visual memory of such situations, nor from the imprint of
haptic sensations of cowering, stretching towards, or embracing,
but also from a human understanding of such relationships. The
practice of an art is an opportunity for pondering such things and
many children ponder more deeply with plastic material between
their hands. The material in its turn suggests images and modifies
those which arise in the mind. The discussion of why a model will
not balance may lead to a discussion of the physical properties of
clay or to the human situation of falling over backwards to avoid
rushing in where angels . . . The two planes cross here in a clay
model illuminating each other, and this is one of the reasons for
including art in education. An illustration of how the material 'may
lead the thought rather than the other way round is given in the
next chapter, 'Eddie's Woman*.

Children and students were often invited, either by me or by a
colleague in consultation, to record their response to a subject or
a situation in a piece of original writing. This helps those who do
not feel that they have successfully communicated their feeling in
clay or paint to search for the appropriate medium for what they

17

THE MINE IN THE CLASSROOM

have to say. It helps others to come to a more full and complete
response through exploring many facets of the theme. Two such
poems follow.

TWO POEMS ON THE THEME THE MINE
BY MEMBERS OF THE CLASS

THE PIT

The grimy filthy pit

The men struggling with giant machines and others just hacking
with hand picks.

The pit ponies who have never seen the earth above, struggling
with giant loads.

The pit, held up by mere logs, and the danger that lurks there, round
any corner, anywhere it comes unexpected in the pit.

At last the day's work is ended and the miners are making their way
home, up, up, and up the sheet face of the pit, dripping dark and still.

Into the light once more we came, the sun a startling contrast to the
pit.

THE MINE

The mine is very deep and long

and very frightened too

I heard the echoes of the deputy

shout so long and shrill

as it meant a frightened ghost

to me. You could hear

the explosions of the coal

beside, behind you

It is a very frightened pit and very lonely too.

18

CHAPTER THREE
EDDIE'S WOMAN

When the 'charming woman' shows herself in all her splendour, she
is a much more exalting object than the idiotic paintings, . . . showman's
garish signs, popular reproductions; adorned with the most modern
artifices, beautiful according to the newest techniques, she comes down
from the remoteness of the ages, from Thebes, from Crete, from
Chichen-Itze; and she is also the totem set up deep in the African jungle;
she is a helicopter and she is a bird; and there is this, the greatest wonder
of all: under her tinted hair the forest murmur becomes a thought, the
words issue from her breasts.

The Second Sex, s. DE BEAUVOIR

CHILDREN and adolescents will, from necessity, in order to
preserve themselves, turn what we offer them to the service
of their own needs and desires. In an atmosphere where
there is any degree of freedom at all, we are able to observe the
inner pressures and needs emerging even through work which is
not, in the usual sense of the term, c free expression*. Some in-
stances from different age-groups will illustrate what I mean.

A keen young student had prepared a lesson during her teaching
practice on painting cats. When she talked to her eight-year-old
group, she asked them if they had a pussy-cat at home and told
them about her cat and tried to engage their enthusiasm for a
subject she felt was very suitable for their age and on which she
had expended considerable preparation. But when she gave out
the paints and most of the children were eagerly starting their
pictures, one little boy ran up to her in great excitement. 'Miss,
I was at a cowboy film last night, it was thrilling; they had them
big hats on and they were galloping after one another on horses.
Miss, can I paint a picture of cowboys?' The student, perhaps
feeling that they ought to respond to the subject which she had
prepared with zest, said firmly, c No, Tommy, today we are paint-
ing- pussy-scats' and Tommy went dejectedly back to his seat

19

EDDIE'S WOMAN

However, when the work came to be collected at the end of the
lesson, Tommy proudly displayed a picture of cats, wearing
cowboy trousers and hats, riding horses!

Another instance is that of a much older boy, an over-grown,
slouching lad of fifteen in an East London slum. Often he
announced that he was bored with art, but just occasionally he
would get absorbed in painting. On this day the teacher, one of a
group working with me on a series of themes, suggested to the
class the subject 'The Sea'. She may have talked about the moods
of the sea, the sea when it was wild and angry and dangerous, the
sea when it was calm and translucent with little waves lapping on
the beach, the sea as one looked down through its depth to all
the wonderful creatures who lived within it, the sea as we knew
it from all the great stories of history, wrecking St. Paul, casting
up Jonah from the whale's belly. She also talked about the sea as
those boys and girls might themselves have experienced it during
a day at Clacton or Brighton, and of their enjoyment of the sea in
paddling and bathing, calling to mind her own and their experi-
ence of water in all its characteristic moods. Now, though Fred,
this morose, over-grown youth, knew, as did all the others, that
he could opt out of any subject suggested and do another of his
own, he did not choose to opt out of it, and presented his finished
picture with 'The Sea' written proudly on the back (Illus. 5 a). A
rich orange sand covered the whole of the background right up
to the top of the page, on which, in fact, no sea appeared, and
on this beach reclined some very large, very plump, extremely
pink and quite naked ladies. There was no need to ask the direction
of Fred's thoughts at that time, and while he could reveal them in
this frank way he had some hope of bringing them into relation-
ship with the rest of his life. Whether it was in any sense a work of
art is another matter, but certainly to try to judge it as a work of
art without taking account of the pressing reason for which it
was painted, would be beside the point.

Another picture on the theme *A Family Group' shows how
space relationships in a picture may be determined by the emotional
situation far more than by any conscious attempt at composition.
The children, a class of twelve-year-old girls, had been shown old
Victorian photographs of family groups by their teacher. She then
asked them what their own family did together, in what circum-
stances one would see them all together? Did they go out together

20

EDDIE'S WOMAN

for picnics or for outings, did their mother take them shopping
with her, or was the only occasion on which the family was seen
together round the meal-table? She asked them to paint a picture
.of.!My Family'. Doris painted the picture which is shown in
Illustration 5c and she herself is represented in the right-hand
corner. One has no need to ask who is the dominating personality
in this family, and the pathetic little scrap who paints herself as
almost pushedTbut of the picture (not even troubling to finish
off the details of hair and clothes as she has done in the other
figures) is seeing herself, as it were, through her mother's eyes.
In the presence of a picture like this, something given with sincere
feeling, it seems to me it would be pointless to criticise this child
for the composition of her picture, to point out that it is un-
balanced, one large figure crushing another up against the side
of the page. This child would feel that what she had given had
not been accepted and, although she could not put this into words,
she might know that the lop-sided truth she had spoken was more
true than the well-balanced composition which we might be
tempted to ask from her. But if the 'image' which is called up in
response to the suggestion of a certain subject owes much of its
personal form to the inner pressures (as in C A Family Group*) and
to the driving interests of the moment, it also owes very much to
the material in which it is formed. Painters have recently been re-
discovering the power of the material to inspire (and some have
almost abdicated from control of it) but craftsmen have always
known this. Not only does a material of character modify a half-
formed image in the artist's mind; it may be the very source of
images itself. 1 Henry Moore has written of keeping pieces of wood
in his studio for years waiting for them to suggest to him what is
to be made from them. In the chapter on the relationship between
the idea and the material, this will be further explored.

I have many personal accounts from students starting with a
lump of clay but no subject, and of how the ideas arose from
working the clay. It is not only that activity stimulates the mind
and that there are always certain fundamental 'ideas' or themes
latent in our minds. Certain materials draw out, as it were, certain
sorts of ideas. Yet that same clay, which evokes or provokes the
kind of work done by the eleven-year-olds when Margaret was

I 1 have written a personal account of this in the chapter c On being a
Potter' in Craft and Contemporary Culture, Harrap and UNESCO, 1961.

21

EDDIE'S WOMAN

quietly modelling her 'rosegarden*, is also the stuff of Sung
pottery, one of the most austere and spiritual forms of art the
world has seen and handled, yet one which has a human warmth
and an acceptance of the physical base of human experience. When
day is used, this keeps breaking through the veneer of superficial
sophistication and prudery, often assumed as self-protection.

Among the subjects which had produced some strange works,
remote from any visual portrayal of the subject, had been that of
mother and child. I had used it, as I have written in Chapter II,
as "one of aTOTmber of suggestions for a two-figure group to
encourage children to see how the different relationships between
people were thrown into relief in a spatial relationship to one
another. I used this subject with the group of boys described in
the last chapter when I had been working with them for about
five weeks. I was emboldened by a good relationship with those
fourteen- to fifteen-year-old boys but, even so, it turned out that
with this group I had approached this difficult and very personal
subject too soon. On this occasion more of them opted out than
on any other and it was interesting to see what they chose to do
instead. As I walked round the class discussing the models with
them, Eddie an undergrown scrap whose ash-fawn hair tended
to stand up straight above his pinched face was modelling a
standing woman. She had not yet any clothes on, but since quite
frequently children attempt to model the figure first and add some
indication of the clothes afterwards, I waited to see what he did.
There was no sign of a child and I did not remark on this but
discussed the need to balance a standing figure so that it did not
fall over side-ways or backwards. The next time I came round to
Eddie his woman was still unclothed and she had now a well-
developed bospm and exaggerated hips. As I looked at the figure
I sensed a certain tension in Eddie and in the boys around, their
heads bent over their own work, but their ears cocked for my
reaction. I pointed out to Eddie that a clay figure needs rather
strong, sturdy legs and that ankles as fine as he had given here were
tending to crack with the weight above. I mentioned that if he
wanted to make such a shapely girl with a small waist and neat
ankles in the current ideal, then he would have to work in some
other material, but with clay the weight of damp clay above was
bound to bear down on the legs and therefore they must be strong
enough to support her full figure. How far was it the damp clay

22

EDDIE'S WOMAN

and how far Eddie's own perhaps unconscious wish that kept
modifying his magazine girl into a buxom maternal woman? The
next time I came round to Eddie he had indeed made the legs
thicker and stronger, but the breasts and buttocks were now built
out in an almost grotesque Tullness. It was a primitive earthy
woman, no more beautiful than Epstein's Genesis. Again I sensed
Eddie's rather fearful expectancy and the watchful silence of the
other boys, who were working either on their own choice of sub-
ject or on rather conventional mother and child groups, many of
animals. Regarding Eddie's woman as any other piece of model-
ling, with careful appraisement, I congratulated him on managing
the legs better, and asked if there was any part that did not satisfy
him. Without raising his head, he muttered something about the
hair, and I fetched a piece of clay and putting it beside him
suggested that we should use it to try out different ways of treat-
ing hair, scratching it, adding small pieces of clay, or simply
treating it as one large mass, demonstrating as I did so with this
extra piece of clay which I then rolled up and gave to him to
practise on. There were many other models in the room which
demanded discussion, so it was only at the end of the lesson that I
got back to Eddie. By this time his woman had a great protruding
belly and obviously it was indeed a mother and child. She was
now quite grotesque, not because of her condition, but by the
crude and over-exaggerated way in which he had modelled her.
This time I did no more than smile at him and comment appreci-
atively on what he had done with the hair which did give the
model more variety 1 and interest, because now the face was sunk
between her breasts, and Eddie's tension seemed to ease with relief
at this acceptance. It was as though he must do this model yet he
hardly dared. He sat back on his stool and stared and stared at
his woman, turning her this way and that way, and patting her
with his hands. By now the time had come to clear up at the end
of the lesson. The boys knew it was never possible to preserve
all the models which had been made; only some of them could be
kept and fired and the rest must be broken up to go back into the
supply of clay. As a rule, those to be kept were decided in discus-
sion but, in addition, they knew that if any boy particularly wanted
to keep his model he could put in a special plea for it. So after

1 The model had by now changed from a lithe pin-up type to something
very like the Paleolithic figure illustrated in fig. 3, p. 115.

23

EDDIE'S WOMAN

accepting their suggestions about which should be kept, I started
the boys on breaking up the rest into the clay-bin and in tidying
up the room. In the busy atmosphere of movement and talk while
this was going on, I went over and sat on the stool beside Eddie.
I had intended to say casually, 'She is going to have a baby soon,
isn't she, Eddie?' but in the presence of Eddie's intensity and
fierceness of possession, casualness seemed out of place. So I just
sat down beside him and smiled at him to let him know I was
happy in what he had done and left the rest unspoken between us.
c Eddie,' I said, 'do you want to keep your model this week?' I
would not have been a bit surprised if he had wanted his woman
kept, so that he could take her home and smuggle her into his
bedroom and brood over her. I would gladly have accepted it if
this had been so. But Eddie looked at her and looked straight at
me with solemn eyes and looked back at her, in a long silence.
Then a slow smile curled up into the corners of his eyes and
brought vitality to his peaked face, and he gave a pat to her
bottom. 'No,' he said with tremendous satisfaction, 'I wanted to
do it and I've done it' and suddenly he picked up his woman and
fiercely breaking her up, threw her with great feeling into the clay-
bin. He had obviously been tempted to keep her, perhaps because
he loved her for her own sake or perhaps to boast about having
dared me. I believe that in the act of destroying her he recognised
something of the crudeness and vulgarity of his portrayal and that
he could go on from that point of understanding. In this case the
breaking up was as important in his education as the making. How
much I would like to have had a photograph of that woman to
preserve. But it would have been quite wrong to have disturbed
Eddie at work to take one. Still less could I make an excuse to
keep her just long enough to photograph. A man on good terms
with the boys might have teased Eddie gently and asked to keep
the model, with this in mind. I sensed that my function was a
different one. What I did was to put a few handfuls of clay in a
tin and as Eddie was going out of the door after the rest of the
boys that afternoon I called him back and said, 'Would you like
some clay to take home, Eddie? You might make some more
models.' If there were any more models I never saw them, but
then regrettedly my relationships to those boys was only that of a
weekly visitor.

Eddie's woman, no work of art, went like so many human

24

EDDIE'S WOMAN

phantasies, back into the bin where she belonged, but his sacrifice
of her must, I am sure, have contributed in the long run to his
maturity. No other material offers quite the plastic responsiveness
of clay, nor invites perhaps so much to sensuous phantasy. Yet
this same lump of clay, which was shaped a week or two before
to the aspirations of a mountaineer, embodied Eddie's adolescent
yearnings, and, broken up, re-emerged the next week, not to stop
a bung-hole, but as a flower-vase offering for Mum's birthday!

R.L. D 25

CHAPTER FOUR
HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.
Little Gidding, T. s. ELIOT

I HAVE described in the introduction how I believed for some
time that in adolescence there should be a greater stress on
visual observation an objective study of the world around.
I had also come to see how an imaginative participation in the
life of other people might be induced by vivid sense impressions,
as in our mimic crawl through the tunnel. I accepted that the
images formed would be modified by emotional pressures, as in
Fred's bathing belles and the relative skes of Doris' family. These
modifications of the visual image would be accepted by most
thoughtful art teachers today. But this belief in the importance of
sense impressions and the imprinting and 'fixing' of an experience
through painting or modelling it, threw no light on Margaret's
rosegarden. I could not forget that model, so remote from visual
or haptic experience, yet so satisfying to the child who made it
and so haunting to me. It seemed to belong to another order of
works and chimed with a different pattern which still eluded me.
These were echoes of it, however, in the fragmentary hints of
another way of working which began to emerge.

It was one of those dark, dirty, foggy evenings familiar to the
West Riding of Yorkshire, and I had come back from a forty-
five-mile round of teaching practice in the industrial areas, from
Rawmarsh to Barnsley, from Barnsley to Pontefract, from Ponte-
fract to Heckmondwike and back to the training college where I
taught. 1 All over the college other tutors were sitting in their

1 My students were resident two-year students training to be teachers,

26

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

little tutorial rooms to which a stream of students came to discuss
their work of the last few days. This often went on till quite late,
but the enthusiasm of the young students, even though they too
were tired, always enlivened and reinvigorated me. Apart from
discussing his work in literature and perhaps movement or re-
ligious education, each student would bring one hundred or more
drawings or paintings and spread them out on the floor as we
relaxed on the easy chairs which were the essential furnishing of
my tutorial room. Thirty or a hundred paintings of the same sub-
ject by secondary modern children might seem boringly the same
to a casual onlooker, but to the student, each one was the work of
an individual. These paintings, spread out like great fans or hands
of cards across the floor were the starting point of our discussion.
On this particular evening I was cold with driving fog all day,
tired with hurrying from school to school, and when the last
student arrived my head was swimming with this succession of
pictures of floods, of volcanoes, of vases of flowers, pit-tips,
portraits. Despite my genuine interest it was in a dreamlike state
that I looked at another hundred or so paintings. As these paint-
ings passed before my eyes almost as blobs of colour and shapes,
some recurring rhythm, some special kind of vision seemed to
emerge from the series. I cannot at this point describe what it
was, only hint at a vague feeling that the same sort of thing was
happening again and again. My rational mind told me that all the
children in the class were often, though not always, painting the
same subject, but it was not the repetition of pit-tips or water-
falls, but rather some way of seeing it which seemed to jump out
at me from this particular set of paintings. When I say this I do
not mean to suggest that these children all drew the scene from
a particular viewpoint or used the same composition. No, it was
rather like a mood which emerges from the hidden structure of
music. I stopped the student in his commentary on the day's
doings, to stare and stare at a painting of a cave in which this
hidden meaning seemed almost emerging. I say 'emerging* because
the picture itself looked superficially a mere daub, nothing in it
was fully worked out, the boy who did it seemed hardly to rely
on his knowledge or memory of the visual world at all. It was
without detail or verisimilitude, only a series of swinging curves

who were taking art as their principal or specialist subject though they
would also be teaching English and perhaps another subject

2?

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

in beautiful contrasted colours of blue, blue-green, grey, violet,
dark green which hollowed back into the centre of the paper,
drawing one in, Robert, the student, exclaimed over this painting,
saying that the boy had seemed quite unnaturally absorbed in
something apparently so simple and undemanding. Of another
cave picture where I detected this same evocative simplification
of form, Robert volunteered that this boy normally wandered
about theVoom^unable to paint, trying to distract the others, but
that on this occasion he had sat down and worked rapidly and
thoughtfully, and produced this picture on which he brooded in
a satisfied manner till the end of the lesson. Robert obviously
appreciated this 'strange' work. Perhaps if I had been feeling
fresher I might have urged him, as I had done other student-
teachers on former occasions, to 'take the work further', to in-
corporate more detailed observation of the known world. For-
tunately, some other quality in the work silenced any such
suggestion. Was it possible that Robert's appreciation of its
quality though he could define that no more than I had 'pro-
voked' its appearance? By what means did he entice this strangely
moving work from secondary modern children of the drab towns
of the industrial West Riding?

Through the following weeks the idea kept recurring that
something unexplained was conditioning those forms, forms not
intellectually planned by these children. The notion that there
was something to investigate was so vague, so tenuous, that it was
a temptation to dismiss it as nonsense, yet it remained with me.

At the end of the teaching practice when the students covered
every available wall of the college exhibition space with the
children's work, and hundreds of paintings were pinned, often
unmounted, touching edge to edge, I hoped that from the sheer
number and proximity there would emerge some clue to that
which had attracted my attention. Formulating some questions I
spent hours in that room trying to see the answer with my eyes.
The questions I asked myself were these.

DO THESE SHAPES OR *WATS OF WORKING' WHICH SEEM TO ECHO
ONE ANOTHER, OCCUR REPEATEDLY IN THE WORK OF ONE CHILD?

Knowing the predilection of some artists for certain shapes and
rhythms, and knowing my own tendency to explore a limited
range of shapes at one time, it seemed likely that this might be

28

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

the explanation. There were only about five or six productions
from one child in a seven weeks* teaching practice, yet I could see
from this survey and from my records of previous years of my
own teaching, that the answer was certainly not an unqualified
'yes'. My knowledge of movement study, gained from contact
with colleagues trained by Rudolf Laban and from opportunities
to join dance groups myself, suggested that certain individuals
would tend to use the same physical rhythms repeatedly and
therefore to reproduce the same forms, but these strange forms
seemed to turn up in the work of whole classes on one day,
rather than in the serial work of one child. So, since I had first
been particularly struck by this quality in the work shown me by
^<~bert, the next query was:

DOES THIS WAY OF WORKING ALWAYS APPEAR IN THE WORK
DONE UNDER ONE TEACHER?

The influence of the teacher in setting the atmosphere and
encouraging one aspect rather than another must always be
allowed for, and it only becomes dangerous when all the children
are beginning to paint in one style. On going through all the work
again, it seemed that the thing I was looking for was quite absent
from the work done under a few student-teachers, but was fre-
quent in that of others who were yet not open to this charge of
encouraging only one style. Yet the influence of the teacher did
not wholly explain it because, even with these last, it was some-
times quite absent for weeks.

There seemed nothing to come to grips with. There were
altogether too many variables. Pinning up hundreds of paintings
in different ways, I searched for a clue, selecting first on one count
then on another. On one occasion I pinned up together all the
work in which any student-teacher had made the comment that
the children appeared to have been absorbed to an unusual degree.
Suddenly it struck me that the subjects portrayed in this group
were very often the same as the subjects in the group where I
thought I detected these elusive simplified forms, which had for
me the same evocative, haunting quality as Byzantine art. Now
obviously, some subjects would be more meaningful to them and
so be treated with greater intensity by some individuals. But could
it be that there was some general relationship between the subject
and the degree of involvement over whole groups?"""'""'"

29

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

Here it is necessary to explain that these students often find
themselves on school practice teaching classes of from thirty to
forty-five in a room which may serve as a classroom for general
subjects before and after the lesson. They work for periods ranging
from a whole afternoon down to that bare forty minutes which is
no more than time to give out and take in painting materials and
discuss the subject, and which therefore virtually cuts out any
value painting may have. Because of these conditions, I en-
couraged them, particularly on teaching practice in an unfamiliar
school, to treat one subject with the whole class. The ideal art
lesson for adolescents as much as small children may be the one
in which children come into the studio, get out their own materials
and work quietly, each on his chosen job, coming to the teacher
for individual help. But this situation presupposes a well-equipped
studio not used as a classroom, so that tools can be left available;
sufficient room for children to move freely at all times without
disturbing others; and classes about half the size of those we
generally have or a long unbroken session to allow for the time
necessary to get out many kinds of equipment, and to give
sufficient attention to explore with each child the subject he has
chosen. Another condition, a tradition of independence in indi-
vidual work can be built up by a teacher but hardly by a student
working for a few weeks in an unfamiliar school.

So, as a general rule, a subject is suggested verbally or presented
in the form of actual objects. It is discussed, and is either drawn
or painted 'straight* or used as an incentive to explore further.
Children may always c opt out' to do something they have an urge
to paint, 1 But some bop will merely draw aeroplanes every time-
and some girls will simply repeat schematic houses or fashion-
plates. If this is not mere laziness or timidity, it means that they
have become fixed or frozen in their emotional relationship to
this object. The house or aeroplane is, as it were, a mummified
image, serving as a channel for emotion perhaps but not offering
fresh experiences. They may be liberated from its constriction
and support in at least three ways. One of these is the challenge
of a new, material, such as stone, or a new tool, such as a graver
rather than brush, which demands a new form. Another is the

1 Since there is no generic term covering to draw, to paint, to sculpt,
to model, I shall use 'to paint* unless another is specifically called for. The
greatest number of illustrations I use are in fact of painting.

30

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

introduction of something which will give a visual shock of
delight, and startle a child into wanting to convey this with the
materials ready at hand. The third and perhaps most important
is the reaching towards ajripre flexible attitude to the obsessional
subject itself by looking at new aspects of it with genuine observa-
tion, and allowing what he actually sees to lead the child towards
a wider relationship with it. This does not of course completely
deal with the inner pressures which produce such an obsession -
that needs skilled treatment but although she cannot give this,
the responsibility of the ordinary teacher with all ages, especially
with adolescents, is more than merely providing the materials
and 'letting them get on with it'.

So, it is in exploring together a chosen subject that most of these
students met their classes.

To return to the question which intrigued me I asked myself,
could it be the subject which evoked this way of working? I could
not yet define to myself what I meant by 'this way of working*
but I felt quite sure that certain arrangements of forms resulted in
pictures which were powerful beyond the usual work of these
children, and which did not depend on draughtsmanship or
painterly qualities. This whole study is subjective and, being
organised within the normal school routine, makes no pretence
of using strict control groups or strictly controlled conditions.
Even so, there was no need to rely on my response alone. I asked
a group of my friends (men and women, mostly housewives,
teachers and training college lecturers in other subjects) to pick
out from hundreds of pictures presented to them those which
seemed to be evocative or taunting*, as one of them described
it, beyond what the skill of the child would lead one to ex-
pect. From their choice, I made a list of the subjects of these
pictures. 1

Next, I asked jnay students (men and women taking art as one
of a number of teaching subjects but with whom I was pursuing
many different issues and who had no idea then of the question
in my mind) to bring to me those pictures, of whatever ^merit*,
which had appeared to absorb"* witH an 'unusual 'intensity the

1 1 presented material mainly from my students, from a few friends and
from my own teaching days, so on the whole these children were aged from
eleven to fifteen, occasionally up to seventeen, and were mostly from
secondary modern schools.

31

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

children making them. I made a list of the subjects which had
inspired those.

I added a third list from a number of 'queer' inexplicable objects
which had been made in my classes from time to time over many
years. It seems strange to me now that I had kept them, carried
them round with me from one dwelling place to another, but they
had compelled me to hold on to them till I could relate them to
something else. These objects were mostly in clay, and, as they
were made in small-group-classes where I had had time to discuss
his idea with each modeller separately, no subject had been
suggested. Their makers, often people of above normal intel-
ligence, administrators, youth leaders, teachers, brought them to
me at the end and named them spontaneously. But they named
something to which they bore little actual resemblance. Never-
theless, they seemed quite different from the unsuccessful attempts
at naturalistic representation which, of course, I also met. I have
brought them into this study because they were similar to the
adolescents' work in two ways: I had observed the unusual con-
centration, the intense personal involvement in their making and the
final satisfaction which hardly seemed justified by the results; and
secondly, they used forms which were strange or unexpected to
represent the idea, and were yet evocative of it. Adolescents and
untrained adults (unless they have long been encouraged by an
appreciative teacher) are usually diffident about their work, and
sensitive to the criticism of their fellows about a result which does
not look like the thing they portray. What other more powerful
force could be transcending this diffidence to give them such
pleasure and satisfaction? The man who made the model illus-
trated in ya, blindfold and at his first attempt at clay, said, 'I
don't know what I've made but I know I have not been so happy
for years as I have been this afternoon/

I made a list qf the 'subjects' of those which had been named,
which included, 'The Hollow Madonna' (Illus. 8b), 'A Woman'
(Illus. 8c), 'The Calyx of a Flower' (Illus. yb). But just as interest-
ing were those in which I thought I recognised clearly traditional
shapes from the art of cultures less bent on the representation of
appearances than European art since the Renaissance has been,
or shapes with an unconscious physiological basis such as 8 a
and ya.

In some cases, as in the sets of the student-teacher Robert's

32

i(a) Margaret's 'rosegarden' which started the whole enquiry. Girl, aged 12. First
day experience. Blindfold session. (F) Man and Woman, suggesting the range of clay

experience. Woman.

Note: Inverted commas indicate that the maker gave it this name or made it
in response to this suggestion.

(*)

z(a) 'Candlestick carriage/ (b) Two 'candlesticks.' (V) Two 'pistols/ All transformations
from original pillar shapes. All by boys, aged 12. First daj experience. Blindfold session.

Two Miners, (b) Miner Crawling, both from Mine in Classroom session.
Both by boys, aged 14.

4(0) Man with Birds. (Miners families are great keepers of pets). Boy,
aged 14, () 'Lovers.' An adolescent's interpretation of the subject 'Two
people'. Boy, aged /j. (V) Miners Pushing Cars. A cave-like enclosing
mine, three inches high. Boy, aged 14.

5(0) "The Sea.' An overgrown adolescent's interpretation, no sea in sight. Boy, 15.

(b] 'My Family.' The painter is on the right, her young brother on the left. Girl, 13.

(e) 'My Family', using rounded shapes and subtle warm colours, Girl, 13.

6(a) 'A Wood.* Pastel. She worked alone in a corner for two sessions. Girl, 13.
(b) 'A Forest/ One of a number who put a house enclosed by trees. Boy, 14.

j(a) Shell Form. This Youth leader said 'I enjoyed myself so much'. Man. First

clay experience. Blindfold session, (b) 'Calyx.' This Primary teacher said e l was thinking

of my wife'. Man. First clay experience. Blindfold session.

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

work, the subject had been suggested by the teacher. In a few
cases they were chosen themselves by children who opted out of
other subjects set by the teachers. In the case of many of the 'queer
objects* they were spontaneously named by the makers, but I do
riot think they always started "with this idea or subject: it often
emerged in the course of the work, as will be described in the
chapter 'Relationships between the Idea and the Medium'.

These three lists, arrived at in different ways, proved to have a
surprising number of 'subjects* in common. This overlap of sub-
ject was a complete surprise and a simple, straightforward explana-
tion must first be looked for.

In the first place, it may be argued that all the teachers of these
groups were, apart from myself, my friends or my students.
Naturally we would have interests in common, and I even
suggested subjects for the students to use with their classes. But
the majority of subjects which I had suggested and had myself
used lay quite outside this list. To give examples at random, sub-
jects from their environment ('Washing Day in the Back Streets',
'Cats at the Dustbin'); subjects likely to be of special interest to
adolescent girls ('A Dressing-table*, which we actually set up in
the classroom, 'At the Manicurist's* two contrasting types of
hand lying on a dark red cushion with all the fascinating para-
phernalia round); subjects which involved concentration on dif-
ferent shapes ('Mechanic's Shop', 'Bottles in Sunlight'); or on
textures ('A Breakfast Table', which again the class and I actually
laid in the classroom with things I had brought from my flat). 1
Although it was my custom with adolescents., to use more than others

1 How far does art education involve us in social education? Almost any
school study does, I suppose, but we teachers of art should be able to give
these children a wider range of experiences without setting up artificial
standards of taste or convention. For instance, on this occasion, I had
brought bright earthenware and several different tablecloths from home, but
the boys' first action was to put a newspaper on the table. When I asked if
we would not put the milk in a jug (I had planned this because it was a nice
shape to paint) one of them seized the implication and said, 'More work for
my Mum'. So we compromised with milk in bottle but we used a tablecloth
because I urged that that was clean whereas the table or a newspaper might
well not be. They took great trouble over choosing which dishes to go with
the table cloth, and exclaimed with pleasure over the final appearance of the
set table, yellow dishes on a blue check cloth with brown bread, butter, and
oranges in a dark blue bowl. We ended by eating the breakfast after four
o'clock when we were cleaning upl

33

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

those subjects which relied chiefly on immediate visual stimulation or on
visual memory ', such subjects did not occur in our lists.

In the second place, if my personal responses and predilections
seem to dominate the work too much, it ought to be pointed out
that several of the subjects did not originate with me at all. 'The
Cave*, one of the most evocative of all, it had never occurred to
me to use. It was used with his classes by a student who came from
Derbyshire which, of course, is steeped in cave lore, and his results
suggested that the children had had an experience so striking that
I later used the theme myself, and found it produced some of the
deepest concentration and evoked some of the most interesting
pictures.

In the third place, once the significance of these themes are seen,
it may be argued that the list covers neither a full range nor is
perhaps the most evocative that could be drawn up, but the
element of chance enters in here. When I tumbled to the impor-
tance of the subjects but was not yet fully aware why these subjects
were important, I used for the list of 'enquiry' subjects only those
we had in fact discovered. I did not invent or add any more. Since we
none of us had been working with this in mind, many which
could have been productive of the sort of work which had this
haunting quality just happened not to have been used. The final
list of subjects is given on page 37 and will be discussed in the
next chapter. The word 'investigation* is more appropriate than
'research'.

It may surprise those not educated at a College of Art to see
how reluctant I was to pin much importance to the subject. But
I was brought up on the dictum 'The subject does not- matter,
the art lies in the way it is painted*. The aesthetic value of a work
of art certainly does not lie in the subject but that is part of its
power to move the artist. When we have searched for subjects
to interest adolescents, we have been, it seems, too apt to look
to thek surface interests, machines, clothes, events of excitement,
neglecting a deeper level about which even they cannot tell us.

When I had reached this stage in my own thought I did not
know how much to put down to my own influence, and though I
had akeady hundreds of paintings from student-teachers, it seemed
that a larger number from different teachers was necessary to test
my suspicion that the key lay in the subjects. At this time I was
asked to run a weekend refresher course for art teachers of the

34

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

neighbourhood, and on the last day I told them that I had been
struck by the evocative power of certain themes and asked for
volunteers to work through a year, using such subjects. There
were about eighteen volunteers of whom six for various reasons
dropped out, and the final group consisted of twelve teachers
working with age^fahge eleven to seventeen in grammar and
secondary modern schools.

Therefore the teachers selected themselves, I did not select
them. I myself, freed from my training college work for a time by
a Research Fellowship from the University of Leeds, taught in
four schools, one boys' and one mixed secondary modern, one
boys' grammar and one mixed private, using themes from the
same list as the teachers.

In addition, as a sort of check, I asked three not very close
friends working in secondary modern schools in other parts of
the country, each to use with one class our list of themes. They
had not seen the pictures which provoked the enquiry and they
were given no explanation of what we might expect (Illus. 28b),
and others omitted for lack of space came from this 'outside'
group.

So, the final list (which I call THE LIST OF THEMES) was drawn
up from the three following lists.

One was the subjects of those pictures and models which had
induced a complete involvement of their makers, an intense con-
centration and satisfaction not usually evident among the less
skilled of secondary children (the more skilled are likely to enjoy
art and to be more absorbed anyway).

The second was the subjects of those pictures which seemed to
have some specially compelling quality to us as spectators (to the
group of colleagues and myself) and which seem subsequently to
have had this appeal for a wider audience.

The third and much smaller list was from those objects and
drawings of strange inexplicable shapes which had absorbed and
delighted adults and adolescents in my own classes and obviously
induced an exceptional degree of absorption. Some of these I had
kept for years from some dim notion that they were significant;
I did not know of what (Illus 6a, ya,b, 8a,b,c, 25a, 3ob.)

The actual form of suggestions to guide the teachers which
we had agreed together, is given on page 38. The question of why
these themes might be evocative had barely been raised with them,

35

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

and according to their own greater or lesser understanding they
might be aware or not of the significance of the themes they were
using. It will be seen from those suggestions that we agreed
together during our preliminary discussion to reduce the intro-
ductory talk at the beginning of the lesson to a minimum so as
not to make direct suggestions beyond the theme itself to the
children. This is not advocated as the way to conduct every art
lesson, but it was necessary in this research so that the teacher's
personality and associations should not be too dominant, so that
the theme itself, the thing we were all using in common and whose
potency we were investigating, should be given full scope. For
the same reason we agreed to give only encouragement, not specific
suggestions or criticism to the work in progress, as most of these
teachers would have been in the habit of doing. In spite of accept-
ing this agreement, several of the teachers were distressed by the
apparent passivity of their role. They felt it was their job to 'help',
to 'improve', the work. They had not fully grasped that this help
might best consist not only in providing an encouraging and
sympathetic atmosphere, but by questions which enabled some
children to visualise more clearly the image they sought. The
formulations of such questions, both in the introduction to the
whole class and to the individual child at his precise phase of
clarification, is one of the most delicate and subtle exercises in the
art of teaching, The rapid adjustment, as one moves from one
child to the next, in entering into the spirit and sensing the direc-
tion of his work is one of the most wearing aspects of teaching.
Far from being passive, it requires a response as immediate and
accurate as a compass needle.

About 3,400 paintings on these themes (approached in this
manner) were studied and compared with many thousands on
other subjects approached in other ways from the same age-
groups. But if this enquiry has any value, it lies less in the
numbers though these appeared to suggest a common under-
lying pattern of response than in the close observation of
individuals at work. If an attempt had been made to conduct this
investigation objectively within strict limits which permitted only
one of a number of planned responses, the whole point would
have been lost. I could not foresee what the children might do
with the themes, nor did I wish to eliminate the 'accidental* or
apparently irrelevant. In addition, one would not wish to tie down

36

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

so narrowly the art work of large groups of children over a critical
year of their lives.

FACSIMILE

IMAGINATIVE PAINTING THEMES SUGGESTED TO TEACHERS TAKING
PART IN GROUP INVESTIGATION

NATURAL OBJECTS
CAVES CAVERNS
SEA (other water subjects)
WOODS
MOUNTAIN PEAKS

MAN MADE OBJECTS
HARBOURS
TUNNELS MINES
LIGHTHOUSES

MEN AND GODS

KINGS QUEENS THEIR CEREMONIES

PRINCES AND PRINCESSES

MOTHER AND CHILD SUBJECTS

FAMILY GROUPS

GIVING OF GIFTS (e.g. THE THREE KINGS,

HARVEST FESTIVAL)
HEROES GODS AND GODDESSES

ANIMALS AND BIRDS
BULLS
HORSES
COCKS

MYTHICAL CREATURES
PHOENIX
UNICORN
DRAGON
MONSTERS

Note The garden theme does not occur in the list because at the time I
had not come to see its significance, and though children had spontaneously
used it I had never given it as a subject.

37

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

FACSIMILE

Suggestions to the teachers who offered at the weekend Conference to join this group

The purpose of this study which we are undertaking together is to find
the forms which arise naturally in the work of adolescents under the stimulus
of imaginative themes such as those in the attached list. Because of this
emphasis on what arises naturally, the direction by the teacher should, in
these lessons only> be kept to a minimum as we agreed together. The creation
of a quiet encouraging atmosphere, in which, after the introduction, the
children can work quite individually, and an acceptance of the finished work
without pressure to take it further or 'work over' it much, will be sufficient.
Above all, the atmosphere should be kept as natural as possible, and any
slight variations from the procedure usually adopted explained as *the way
we are doing it this time*.

But although the minimum of actual instruction to the class or individuals
is suggested, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that the teacher is not
being encouraged to subdue his own personality during the introduction,
but rather to draw fully on his own and on the children's experiences. The
subject can be explored as fully as possible between teacher and children, as
is probably usually done, with a discussion of their ideas on their experience
of their associations with it. No one style is emphasised as being more
desirable than others. The children can be urged to clarify their individual
vision for themselves before they begin.

We agreed, you will remember, that we must avoid in this particular series ',
giving suggestions about the form of the objects or the arrangement on the
paper. Naturally, any previous teaching in arrangement or composition will
emerge if it has been absorbed by the children, and any knowledge of the
appearance of figures or natural objects from previous experience may be
apparent. But if this is not so, it need not be commented on, and unusual
forms can be accepted without correction and without the children's being
directed back to look at such objects again. Nevertheless we must guard
against looking for certain forms rather than others.

We shall all be fully aware that under these circumstances some children
will not take their work as far as it is possible for them, or finish their
paintings as fully as we might wish, but if a genuine statement has been made,
we must accept that danger for the first few weeks until the individual
language emerges clearly enough for us to be sure the help we offer is in the
same idiom. Pictures or books normally available may be left about as usual,
but no special pictures or illustrations of sculpture should be shown directly
in connection with these lessons.

It is suggested that this series of subjects should be worked through with
one class or two classes and not used indiscriminately with any group in
the school. It would be most illuminating to see work in clay and in paint
by some children, but where this is not possible the clay series 1 might be
used with one group and the painting series with another.

1 So few teachers managed to use the clay series that no general conclusions could
be drawn and it was dropped from the Investigation.

38

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

MATERIALS

The materials should be those generally used in the school but painting
with little or no preliminary drawing will often be found to have a releasing
effect on the children's ideas. It is suggested that wherever possible, the
choice of size and colour of paper be left to the children, and large and small
sheets of different coloured paper, powder colour, perhaps Indian ink,
watercolour, pastel should, if possible, be available. 1

The preparation of materials, which is noisy and disturbing, should be done
before the subject is explored so that when the moment of stimulation comes
the children can immediately get to work.

When I first tried out some of these themes with children (in
my own return to school teaching that year) I used to introduce the
day's subject with a general discussion, asking the children to con-
tribute their experiences or ideas to us all before settling down to
work encouraging the 'active participation of the class' as it is
called in books on teaching method. But I soon discovered that
with these themes this had a disturbing rather than a settling
effect, and that the children did participate to the full when they
were painting. There was no need to enrich their ideas by the
contribution made by others. Even the less imaginative had that
richness of association in themselves if one could only tap it (as
pondering on these themes so often did). I was trying to help
each to draw on his own evocations by pointed questions, and it
only pulled him away from his personal image to hear others
discussing theirs. The vociferous, lively atmosphere, desirable in
some lessons, was not the one needed here, but rather a tranquil,
more contemplative attitude, a quiet acceptance of whatever
images came. Sometimes this was induced by using movement
if that seemed appropriate (I wish now that we could have com-
bined these sessions with dance), sometimes by reading a poem,
an incantation, always by my quiet roaming in talk round the
theme itself but softly enough to allow those ready to start to do
so undisturbed.

The kind of question I myself asked my class, in for instance
the Cave subject, were such as these: Isjottr cave in a mountain

1 Oil paints were not unfortunately used in any of these classes in these schools,
and while I was experimenting elsewhere with having the powder colours available
for mixing either with water, oil or egg for tempera, it seemed better not to introduce
the complication of a new medium or attention would be focussed on the medium
rather than the subject.

39

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

or on the sea-shore? Is it high and light so that you can see every-
thing clearly, or is it dark, and if so, what colours are the shadows?'
'Can you see in your mind's eye the shapes, one against another?
What shape are the hollows through which you see the further
recesses?'

I never asked the children to answer their questions in words
but to sit quietly and let the answer for their caves rise in their
minds. In this way each child could build up his own image with-
out being distracted by other people's ideas.

I then found, in fact, that the children often worked with great
speed, not pausing for intellectual planning or criticism on the
way, and nearly always with extreme concentration. They usually
finished their pictures in one double period, often in much less,
and I never suggested they should return to them the next week.
Sometimes they finished them in a much shorter time, though
occasionally someone would do the same subject again im-
mediately. Sometimes we worked on several aspects of a theme
at once, choosing for instance from the subject of ( Water' what-
ever mood they wished to treat. On the other hand, with one class,
after using The Sea one week, I suggested that we should all do
Rivers slow and calm or rushing and wild the next week, and
Pools and Harbours the week after. They then went on to fire
, subjects. (By chance, this obvious theme had not presented itself
in time to be incorporated in the list, but it seemed a fitting con-
trast to the water themes and I used it.)

Some of the themes and the adolescents' response to them will
be described in the next chapter.

The teachers were visited in their schools occasionally during
the year to see the classes at work, and most of them met again
during the year and finally for a residential weekend to look at the
work and to discuss various approaches to art education.

One of the twelve, a teacher in a grammar school, produced
work which lacked almost completely the sense of power and
'haunting quality' which had first suggested the subjects, and on"
the other hand his children did not show the fresh, visual images
which they might have gained by working from direct observa-
tion. I think, in that case, this scheme was probably a failure
because the underlying idea was unacceptable to one too in-
secure to trust the themes themselves. Its success relies on the
Igachet's, permissiveness and a confidence in the theme to carry

40

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

the children along on its tide, as it were. These teachers varied
greatly in personality, training and experience. In all other cases,
work of great interest was produced. Though I can speak from
direct experience only of the children I taught, many of these
teachers said that the children had been absorbed and produced
'better' work, though they could not define (and I did not yet try
to do so) what the essential difference from their former teaching
was. In the case of one woman at least, her headmistress told me
that participation in this scheme had transformed that teacher. 1
She had 'taken on a new life' and tf the atmosphere in the art room
was completely different', 'she seems to have found herself in this
scheme'. In the case of one student- teacher working in an approved
school, the headmistress believed that this clay-work had provided
an invaluable outlet, especially for one girl with strong homo-
sexual tendencies. It is true that instead of reclining in her friends'
arms all her free time she took to clay- work and produced count-
less masculine models, and that her general outlook improved
greatly during this period, but it would be impossible to prove any
causal connection. These approved school girls frequently said
that their happiest hours in the week were those with the clay;
they could c be themselves' with it.

One can only estimate the effect of any aspect of education on
any particular child when one knows him intimately and when one
also knows all the other influences bearing on him at that time.
Perhaps no one ever does know this about any human being. I
can make no extravagant claims for the idea I put forward. I shall
only say that in the hands of teachers who themselves are tem-
peramentally fitted to use it and these proved to be not of one
but of many types this does appear to offer adolescents a pro-
found experience of a kind which is singularly lacking not only
in their education but in the rest of their lives today.

Seeing the list of subjects arrived at by the empirical method
described, I confess to a hesitation in using it because it seemed to
include an insufficient number of the subjects which I would have
thought specially appealing to adolescents of the mid-twentieth
century^r-no bicycles, no aeroplanes, no jets or space men though
there were some subjects, e.g. tunnels and mines, which belonged
rather specifically to our, the industrial, area. Yet, though they were

1 It is possible that any kind of stimulus and periodic discussion of work
might have this effect on a teacher in a culturally barren district.
R.L. E 41

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

free to opt out, those who did so did not often turn to jets or
space men.

Although the teachers stressed that any style or treatment was
acceptable, what struck me most in my own classes and in visiting
theirs was the fact that, even when one was aware of intense
activity, there was a brooding, contemplative quality about the
atmosphere. The pictures and models seemed to confirm this.

It will be seen that many of the suggested themes lie not far
from the normal range of subjects used in art lessons. Why then,
out of scenes of commercial activity, should "A Harbour' more
often result in pictures of compelling quality than 'A Railway
Station?' Why did the suggestion to draw 'A Tree' often en-
courage the children to draw more objectively, relying greatly on
their viswl memories, while 'A Wood' or C A Forest' (Illus. 6b, 6a)
produced pictures in a mood of mystery often with overtones of
fear? Yet if one looks for an aura of mystery living on from the
past, a tree has been a focal idea associated with worship since
prehistoric times, and was carried into Christian iconography.
For me, as teacher, 'The Tree* had more conscious associations
than 'The Wood* which seems to argue against the determining
influence of the teacher's associations. But even in the specific
form of the Tree of Life it appears to have, for most people, lost
since the Reformation its deep significance, whereas the 'dark
forest' theme has been kept alive not only through the Grail
legends in their changing forms, but also for children through
the fairy tales (especially those of German origin), such as Hansel
and Gretel.

Of course all the themes used except the fantastic beasts
could be interpreted factually, as memory pictures from former
observations. A few children always did this. Many of these
children had been taught deliberately to recall memories and to
use earlier sketches from observation in their 'imaginative' work.
I myself have encouraged children to do this in many fields of
art. But during these sessions I found they seldom stopped to
refer Jo sketchbooks. I tried only to ensure that the teacher^shpuld
accept whichever of many approaches the pupil chose, not insist
on one.

I found myself more prepared to accept the idea that such themes
might be very important to younger children (who have always
received much of their education through the fairy tales or their

4*

HOW THE THEMES EMERGED

equivalents) but It was difficult to accept in adolescents. (It would
have been interesting to study the way in which such suggestions
ate used by children during the latency period., but I have not
been able to do this systematically. I would hazard a guess that
the treatment would be less evocative and more objective than
either before or after.) I have explained that my previous practice
of art teaching with adolescents had stressed the necessity of
objective studies, in the disciplined exploration of their medium.,
and in an appreciation of their environment, especially perhaps
the industrial environment which often demands of those who
live in it a perceptive eye to make its squalor bearable. All these
persist but I have come to see that they are only a part of the whole.

Some of the themes on the list were used by all of the teachers
some by only a few. We had intended to work right through this
list during the year but for various good reasons this was not
always possible. The choice of those they used was left to the
teachers and would probably be influenced by their own response
to them. This is inevitable and even desirable in art teaching.

Some themes proved more evocative than others in all the
schools, and since it is not possible to describe the treatment of
them all, here is a selection of these, introduced by the kind of
thoughts which arise in my mind in response to this theme. At
the end of each section are some of the poems written by the
children either at the end of the class or at home after these
lessons, or under the inspiration of a colleague, Paul Haefiher.
While I was teaching temporarily in one of the secondary modern
schools he became interested in this research and he and a drama
tutor and I agreed together to use these themes in the three arts
with the same group of thirteen-year-old boys and girls. Their
drama it was impossible to capture, but some of their poems and
pictures are reproduced in the next chapter along with those from
my own and the classes of the participating teachers.

43

CHAPTER FIVE

THE THEMES THEMSELVES
(I)

SOME ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE THEME OF WATER

In one of the ancient stones of the Creation the beginning of every-
thing was when Eros (Love, Desire) issued from the egg of Night
which floated upon Chaos.

On the first day God said, 'Let there be light', on the second He 'made
the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament
from the waters which were above the firmament'.

And on the third He gathered the waters under the heaven 'unto one
place, and let the dry land appear; and the gathering together of the
waters called He Seas'.

In the sixhundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the
seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the
great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened . . . and
the flood was forty days upon the earth . . . and the waters prevailed
and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the
face of the waters.

Authorised Version, Genesis I

The sea, or the great waters, are the symbol for the primordial un-
differentiated flux, the substance which became created nature only by
having form imposed upon or wedded to it.

Its first most obvious characteristic is its perpetual motion, the
violence of wave as tempest; its power may be destructive, but unlike
that of the desert, it is positive. Its second is the teeming life that lies
hidden below the surface which, however dreadful, is greater than the
visible.

The Enchafed Flood, w. H. AUDEN

TIDES are fundamental to out lives. There were tides on the
molten earth before there was water and their motion was
inherited by the seas as they formed from streams of rain
falling on the cooling earth. At some point the critical degree of
temperature and saltness was reached, developing borderline

44

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

forms of life, not quite plant, not quite animal, barely living. But
when the clouds of steamy atmosphere rose and the sun penetrated
that dim world, organic substances which could use sunlight to
manufacture chlorophyll developed, and other organisms who
could not do this devoured those and so the whole complex food
chain on which we now rely for nutrition was initiated.

All these aeons the sea creatures lived in accordance with the
tides and there is some evidence that minute sea-creatures and
possibly some fish still have their breeding times in accordance
with the tides. 1 During all this time the continents had no life.
It is fascinating to imagine the world of those days as described
by Rachel Carson. 2

There was little to induce living things to come ashore, forsaking
their all-providing, all-embracing mother sea. The lands must have
been bleak and hostile beyond the power of words to describe.
Imagine a whole continent of naked rock, across which no covering
mantle of green had been drawn a continent without soil, for there
were no land plants to aid its formation and bind it to the rocks with
their roots . . . There was no living voice and no living thing
moved over its surface . . . So, for more than three-quarters of
geologic time, the continents were desolate and uninhabited while
the sea prepared the life that was later to invade them and make them
habitable.

The land could not become habitable until the bare surface had
been clothed with plants with mosses and ferns and seed-plants.
In time a few of the sea species developed lungs which could
breathe air and learned to drag themselves across the mud or
survive in dried-up pools. In course of time they became inde-
pendent of the sea which had been their birthplace, and developed
legs and wings and began to evolve the ancestors of our present
forms of life. e When they went ashore the animals that took up a
land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a
heritage which they passed on to their children and which even
today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient

sea.

3

Rachel Carson is speaking of the salty stream we carry in our

1 Briffault, The Mothers, vol. II, p. 429, and Darwin.

2 Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, p. 8, Pelican, 1956.

3 Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, Chap. I, Pelican, 1956.

45

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

veins, but there are other evidences in human life of our origin
and relationship with the sea, not only in physical traces such as
the moon cycle of women, but in our social institutions as in the
observance of a seven-day week, which can be traced back
through pre- Jewish times to the lunar cycle, still observed in
some primitive societies today.

But if the tides give to our lives a certain element of pattern,
the unpredictability of the sea is part of its terror. Even within
the enclosed basin of the Mediterranean, the storms for which
Jonah was blamed and which wrecked St. Paul are part of our
history. The Odyssey is full of the sea, and the sea encompasses the
islands of its separate episodes the island of Calypso, the sea
nymph, where we first meet Odysseus dallying, Circe's Island, the
island of the Phaeacians (the Minoans) of whom Homer wrote,
'Poseidon has made them a sailor-folk and these ships of theirs
are as swift as a bird or as thought itself.'

To the landward Greeks the sea was a thing of mystery (Hesiod
the farmer said, 'Go to sea if you must, but only from mid- June
to September and even then you will be a fool' *), and the place
of many mysterious births. Aphrodite, the Goddess of Desire,
rose naked from the sea riding on a scallop shell. It was held that
she sprang from the foam which gathered about the genitals of
Uranus when Cronus, his rebellious son, threw them into the sea.
His son, Zeus, dethroning him in turn, is credited with begetting
children in many quarters, and Leto bore Apollo to him on the
Sacred Island of Delos which floated, so they said, on the sea. To
this day no one is allowed to be born or die there.

The sea is also a way of escape, as it was to Leto from Hera's
jealousy; and when Daedalus fled from King Minos' anger (for
having helped his wife to couple with the Bull and produce the
monster Minotaur) it was on wings across that sea, into which
Icarus fell as Breugel painted. Since the sea separates, what
comes from over it is strange, perhaps precious. How foolish was
King Mark to send Tristram across the sea to fetch his bride! A
journey across the water changes people, effects a transformation,
even a rebirth. This is typified in baptism, which was first
performed by wading waist-deep into the water, then in sunk
baptistries built on river banks and only later by a token
sprinkling.

1 Quoted by Kitto in The Greeks, p. 43, Penguin.

46

THE THEMES THEMSELVES
The transformation through death by water is elaborated in

He has suffered a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

It recalls to our minds the sea-wasted Palinurus episode of The
Waste iMttd, relating Desert and Sea- Waste.

The sea, as an undifferentiated chaotic element, against which
man must pit his strength, is a challenge which must have mould-
ed the thought and character of an island people. Strangely
enough, perhaps the deepest expression of this in England came
from Joseph Conrad, a central European, born far from the sea.
He uses the revelation of the power and terror of the sea as a
symbol for the recognition of the depths and alien elements in
our own nature. Melville, the other sailor- writer who has explored
for us man's struggle with the sea and its creatures in Moby Dick.,
works out his narrative in terms of a symbol, so rich, so complex,
that it can. be read as an adventure story or a travail of the human
soul. (This is the quality of a true symbol to be many things to
many men at the level they can accept.) He draws very near
Conrad when he says, 'As this appalling ocean surrounds the
verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti,
full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horror of the
half-known life/ But in another mood Melville writes, 'There is
one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath/ The
description of the concourse of whales is a most moving paean to
warm-blooded life. 1 Both Conrad and Melville, although they
also describe the sea in its sunny moods, are most telling, most
powerful, when they describe the horror and the terror of the sea
in storm. On the other hand, Coleridge, in The Ancient Mariner -,
reveals the horror of the sea in unnatural stagnation, in the putrid
slowing down of its water within which the slimy snakes are seen.
To him the tidal nature of the sea, which bears one home over
the harbour bar towards the lighthouse and the kirk, is its essential
grace. When 'the very deep did rot* it revealed the horror of its
depths but also the beauty of the snakes which surprised the
Mariner into delight and opened the saving channels of response.

W. H. Auden 2 has seen the sea primarily as chaotic, terrifying,
as something so horrifying that in the vision of the new Jerusalem

i Moby Dick, chap. LXXXVII. 2 W. H. Auden, The Enchafld Flood.

47

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

the Gospel writer has cried with relief "there shall be no more sea'.
Powerful, perilous, immense we know it to be, yet to many of us
the sea will remain rather the one who bears up, the element
which embraces and purifies men and shores alike c the moving
waters at their priest-like task of pure ablution'. And, as the
thunder of the sea is captured in miniature in a shell, so, as the
pressures and trivialities of the job press in on us, a picture or a
line of a child's verse will open our horizons and

though inland far we be

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither.

THE PICTURES AND POEMS MADE ON THE THEME OF WATER

I was struck by the fact that of all the children to whom the
general subject of 'Water' was suggested through discussion of
the different aspects of water in the sea, in rivers, in lakes, pools,
waterfalls, the great majoritj of^tbe boys chose. to represent the
sea in storm, with waterfalls as the next most popular aspect.
Waterfalls also come second with the girls but the majority of
them painted a pool. This might be explained in many ways.
Battling with stormy seas is a common fantasy for boys of an
island people, and may even be a genuine anticipation of their
careers. The actual experiences with water which these adolescents
have had will influence their choice of picture. Yet ;t may repre-
sent a real difference which a consideration of the literature of
waterfalls and pools in the next section might suggest to us.

When the established connection of the sea with our bodies is
recognised, it is not difficult to explain why adolescents, when
faced with the subject Water react in such strong ways. It appears
to be deeply satisfying to find some way or means of expressing
this hidden physical rhythm, which may be soothing with the
lowered tension of an undulating motion, or forceful with the
surge of power. Liquid paint is one of the most sensuous, fluid
substances and one can identify oneself with a wave or a water-
fall in the very act of painting it. But liquid paint is difficult to
control and frustration over a lack of technique may dam the
powerful feelings rather than channel them into an incentive to
acquire it.

4*

9 'Waterfall/ Drawn with candle wax and watercolour. Girl, 14.

io(a) The Great Wave. Wax and watercolour, on the theme 'The Sea'. Boy, 14.
(fy Tool with Spray.' Powder paint and ink, glowing orange, blue black. Girl, 14.

1 1 (a) Snaky Sea, recalls Coleridge's 'slimey snakes', a non- visual image.

Boy, 14. (#) A Pool. A restless, noisey girl made this simple soft blue-

white pool. Girl, 14.

iz(a) 'Harbour', by a timid girl a 1 3 ; no way in or out, the houses dominate
it. (b) Barnsley Park', on the theme 'Water'. An etiolated echo of Margaret.

Girl, 14.

i-3 (tf) Stalactite Cave, receding hollows, modelled stalactites enclose recesses in

soft colours. Boy, 15. (b] Toothed Cave, monster-like forms emerge from slimey

depths, harsh tones. Boy, 14.

1 5 (a) Dolmen Cave, X-ray view showing pale sun over hill. Inarticulate
Boy, 13. () CradJe Cave, mound in centre, pool, stalactites, cradle.

Girl, 12.

16(0) Silver Stream Cave; cave with silver stream issuing from centre of blue-
grey circles. Girl } 14. (H) Treasure Cave, man-made construction, artificial light,

hard lines. Girl, 13.

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

It was necessary to devise a way to help these adolescents 1 to
identify themselves with the water whose nature they were ex-
ploring.

On the occasion when Illustrations loa and 9, The Wave and
The Waterfall, were painted, I gave them contrary to the usual
choice of colour only white paper. The paints were ready beside
them, but for the first five or ten minutes they worked only with a
candle held in their hands, using either the pointed or the stubby
end.

We spoke about the quality of water, the way in which the sea
heaves itself up in waves, or rushing rivers narrow in a gorge and
throw themselves over into space, and of the way in which a
whirlpool circles into a centre eddy, is sucked under, and spirals
out again to the circumference of the pool. I suggested to the
children that if they wished they might close their eyes but in any
case they should feel the movement of the water in their arms and
their bodies. With the candle held in their hands, they first swung
themselves into making the movement in the air, then, when they
felt they had captured some water rhythm, without a break they
transferred it to the paper with the candle wax which left (at this
stage) no obvious trace. They gave themselves up to this activity
with extraordinary absorption. The girl who made the waterfall
(Illus. 9) fiercely dashed her arm up and down almost the full
length of the paper. The boy who made the great wave (Illus. xoa)
did this in one great sweep of his arm, concentrating solely on this
one wave and giving only a few small strokes to the boat and the
rest of the scene. 2

1 Younger children accept the vagaries of the medium in less frustration
because they read into or do in fact see y in what they have done, that which
they intended to do.

2 This picture does bear an obvious resemblance to Hokusai's The Great
Wave. It is not, of course, impossible that an adolescent should have seen a
reproduction of this print which has been not uncommon in our country
for some years. When one compares the two, however, there are obvious
differences. The backward bending curve of Hokusafs Wave is repeated
in the smaller, ckwlike sprays of foam which reach out to clutch the un-
fortunates in the boat. The wave is conceived as one part of the whole sea
in motion and its shape is repeated in other waves which give the picture a
more complete formal unity. Timothy, on the other hand, has concentrated
on the idea of one wave; he has not thought of the whole sea but he has seen
that wave rearing itself up and forward in menace. He has not identified
himself with the people in the boat but with the water which threatened to

49

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

When the boys and girls had exhausted their first intense pre-
occupation with the movement of water, they could turn to another
quality, colour. They mixed the paints which were ready to hand,
and washed rather liquid colours freely over the white paper. Now
the candle-grease marks, the exact trace of their movements, were
revealed because the grease threw off the paint and left the white
paper showing. So the movement which had been jfe// a moment
before as an inner personal thing, miraculously became visible as
something leaving its pattern on the world outside. These pictures
had a directness and spontaneity which delighted them as much
as me.

The danger of such a method becoming a stunt (in this case,
perhaps producing pictures with a superficial resemblance to
Henry Moore's) is only averted by a sincere concentration on the
experience rather than the results. Certainly it freed these children
from self-consciousness and helped them to lose themselves in
contemplation of one element of their natural environment. A few
of the class went on to explore systematically the effects which
wax and paint produced, and to use them with foresight.

Often, it is not possible to provide fresh visual stimulus for a
picture involving sea or waterfalls, and the children's visual
memories may have been overlaid by commercial posters, e.g. of
harsh yellow sand, and flat cobalt sea. Since they are surrounded
by such placards with crude status symbols and superficial wish-
fulfilments, we cannot blame them if they fall back on these
secondhand images. But we can tell them of Keats* words:

The Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man:
It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watch-
fulness in itself. In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the Sea, and
thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the
quicksands & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore
and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice. 1

The pictures just described arose from expressing in their bodies
something of the rhythm of water. Through opening the channels
of present experiences in one sense, it was hoped to encourage

overwhelm them. The rest of the sea undefined, it is only the element, as it
were, from which this one great wave arises.

1 To Hessey, letter 90 in the Forman Edition, O.U.P., 1931.

50

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

the use of memories in other senses. It is not possible to prove
whether this happened but the comment of one pupil is interesting:

As I was swinging my arms I began to remember all the waterfalls
I had ever seen. I saw them jumping off the rocks so I forgot about
looking and jumped too but I don't know how it feels at the
bottom.

Possibly such a method is more successful with those who
experience most fully through sensation.

Pondering on the theme in words (as has been described) often
produced an image which was apparently remote from any sense
memories, but which yet had an authenticity.

The boy who painted Illustration na has used a configuration
for the waves which bears no visual relationship to their actual
shape but perhaps echoes Coleridge's 'slimy snakes'. He, a
secondary modern boy of fourteen, said he did not know the
poem, but he may have forgotten that he had heard it while yet
remembering the image. At any rate, his strange picture reminds
us of our first ancestors who dragged themselves across the shore
on to dry land. For me it provides too a link with the ancient
mother goddess, who in the form of the snake goddess at Knossos
was honoured by the bull leaping, and whose Familiar survived as
the classic python at Delphi.

What are we to make of the harbour picture (Illus. i ia) by a girl
described by her teacher as *slow and timid*? There were many
virile harbour pictures some particularly fine ones by children
who had visited Whitby and painted the great claws of the North
Sea anchorage stretching out and almost encircling the little
herring boats within its calm. But here is a harbour that has no
outlet no inlet! Two clumsy landlubberly boats (few boys would
have drawn box-like boats with so little possibility of speed, an
ineffectual sail and a mere suggestion of a funnel), squat, inert
and hopeless, as though they had given up all hope of voyaging
over the waves again. The significance of walls in drawings has
been realised and few alert art teachers can have missed the
obsessive way in which many children work on the wall round a
garden with more care than the garden itself. Here the embracing
quality which emerged in the other harbour pictures is hardened
into that dark wall; the rather obsessional houses (menacing to
me) have no chimneys (no life within?); and the water itself not

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

done by the candle method I have described is reduced to dead
mud. It is a sad picture.

In my mind, this picture is linked with another painted on the
theme of Water (Illus. izb). When most of the adolescents in the
group were stirring up storms at sea, or rushing over waterfalls,
Violet chose to paint a pool in the park at Barnsley. Drawn in ink,
and painted in light, delicate watercolours, this picture represents
water tamed, civilised and kept within very strict bounds. The
carefully tended flowers bloom feebly, the little birds chirrup ; it
is the kind of park a too-well-brought-up little gkl can safely
wander in. But with its fountains and roses it has a faint and
etiolated echo of Margaret's rosegarden. Perhaps it is a personal
vision just barely kept alive in an unsympathetic household or a
harsh district, something to which she clings even though its
debility of colour and line hardly survive among the strong, virile
coarseness of her coal-mine environment.

The first poem is by a primary and the other five by secondary
children.

THREE POEMS ON

THE WATERFALL

Now smoking and frothing
Its tumult and wathin
Till in the rapid race
It reaches the place
Of its steep descent.

It runs down the hillside,

Never changing its course,

It's not very small and it's not very wide

It g^gles about as it reaches the moors

It leaps over the stones

Which stand in its way.

It ripples through the countryside
Mingling with the morning tide.
Hurrying, Scurrying to the sea
With the energy of a tiny bee.

5*

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

It gurgles and bubbles on its way down
Twisting and turning past many a town.

I thunder down the side of a cliff with a tremendous force.
When I reach the bottom foam flies about everywhere.
At each side of me there are large rocks
Sometimes you will find a small cave behind me
Rivers join into me, as they reach the hillside.

THE SEA

The rolling bounding sea

On a misty cloudy day

The peaceful hush of the sea

On a lovely sunshiny day.

The seagulls crying and the white foam

The cliffs tower above the white sands

And the caves dark and gloomy

The boats sail on the coloured water

I like the sea, the sea.

WATER

I hardly make a sound

but I am so strong

That no man can stop my demand

I aim to cover all the land

I wrecked the galleons

I wrecked the steamers

And I aim to wreck

All the ships that sail upon me.

THE SEA

The sea kicks the wind blows,
The ships sway to and fro,

The waves foam on the windy shores,
The waves twist against the rock,
And when the waves splash on the rocks

53

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

He sounds like a roaring under,
And when the sea goes out again.
The shells glisten in the sun,

And fossils with their patterns,
And fish glide near the sandy shores
And when you listen to the shells,
You hear the sea roaring.

(II)

SOME ASSOCIATIONS WITH THE THEME OF CAVES

'Birth

Rhea, wife of Cronus, was overwhelmed with boundless grief [because
Cronus swallowed each of their children as soon as it was born]. When the
time approached for her to give birth to Zeus . , . she went to Crete and
there, in a deep cavern, she brought forth her son,

'Encyclopaedia of Mythology (Larousse)

Love

Soon during the hunt a confused rumbling started in the sky. Dido and
Troy's chieftain found their way to the same cavern. Primaeval Earth and
Juno, Mistress of the Marriage, gave their sign. The sky connived at the
union; the lightning flared; on their mountain peak nymphs raised their cry.
On that day were sown the seeds of suffering and death.

Aeneid Book VI, trans. Jackson Knight

Marriage

One day Kore was gathering flowers with her companions when she
noticed a narcissus of striking beauty. She ran to pick it, but as she bent to
do so, the earth gaped open and Hades (Dis) appeared. He seized her and
dragged her down with him into the depths. Hades plunged back into the
earth hollowing out a vast cavern in the process . . .[later] Zeus commanded
Hades to return young Kore who since her arrival in the Underworld had
taken the name Persephone to her mother. Hades complied . . . but before
sending his wife up to the earth tempted her to eat a few pomegranate seeds.
Now this fruit was the symbol of marriage and the effect of eating it was to
make the marriage indissoluble.

Encyclopaedia of Mythology (Larousse)

Life after death

There is a cleft in the Eubean Rock forming a vast cavern. A hundred
mouthways and a hundred broad tunnels lead into it, and through them the
Sibyl's answer comes forth in a hundred rushing streams of sound. . .
'Aeneas, O man of Troy/ she cried, 'are you still an idle laggard at your
vows and prayers? For till you pray the cavern's mighty doors will never
feel the shock and yawn open.*

Aeneid Book VI, trans. Jackson Knight
54

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

Meditation

And Elijah when Jezebel threatened his life came thither unto a cave, and
lodged there, and behold the word of the Lord came unto Mm, and said
unto him 'What doest thou here, Elijah?* And he said, % even I only, am
left, and they seek my life to take it away.' And he said, *Go forth and stand
upon the mount of the Lord.' And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great
and strong wind rent the mountains . . . but the Lord was not in the wind:
and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:
and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the
fire a still small voice.

The Old Testament, i Kings, 19

THE counterpart to fluid water is solid earth, and caves, which were
hollowed from the rocky ground by flowing rivers, hold immu-
table the reverse mould, the concave antithesis of moving water.
In their hollows the solidness, the massive weight of the earth, is
most present to us because it is not only beneath our feet, but
above our heads and round our sides, encircling us. The light,
coming from only one aperture, emphasises the roundness of the
forms, smooth stalactites or jagged ridges or faceted boulders.
The drip of water reverberates in the silence and the gush of a
stream is as thunder. The semi-darkness heightens our other
senses. We rely for our safety on the echoes resounding from dark
surfaces and use our finger-tips as antennae as we grope along the
walls. It is cold, cold, and the dank smell has the ancient odour of
bats and snakes.

Caves are the unfathomable places of the earth, drawing one in
curiosity and fear, in excitement and apprehension. Through
them we go into the bowels of the earth, into the secret places.

We cannot forget that to our remote ancestors these offered
their only shelter, and those who could not accept caves, could
not feel at home in their domed hollows, must have died out in the
glacial epochs. Palaeolithic families lived at the mouth of the cave,
and issued out into the world to hunt or search for wild fruits to
fend off the continual hunger. But they went back into the heart of
the cave to depict these astonishing animals, so vividly alive
today beside the faceless skulls of their makers- The cave is a
place of mystery, and therefore of propitiation for in the face
of mystery we try to enter into some relationship with the un-
known power. Even when men learned to build cities in the
plains with sundried bricks, the cave remained a place for worship,
and where there were no natural caves men built dolmens and

55

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

earthed them up to create underground chambers for their
mysteries. All our later temples echo this, the Gothic vaults, the
Orthodox domes. A more frivolous age titillated its sense of
mystery by building mock grottoes for romantic encounters.

Caves are the legendary haunt of the snake and the dragon,
guarding a treasure of gold or a princess; or the couch of mortals
who sleep a hundred years and come forth again. Caves are places
to which sages, heroes and saints retire for meditation or renewal
retire into themselves perhaps, to bring forth a new capacity for
thought or deeds. Caves are often the birthplace of streams which
well up as inexplicably from the depths as creative thought
itself.

This is implicit in Prospero's cave in The Tempest, the brooding
centre of the enchanted isle, in which he hatches dreams and
comes forth to wreak his magic of wits bedevilled in mazy
wanderings, of storms which initiate that sea-change which turns
out to be a kind of resurrection, of symbols of air and earth made
manifest in creature form.

But these are the pregnant caves of poets. Plato, a rationalist,
felt that poets encouraged a dangerous phantasy and banished
them from the Republic. He plants his deluded watchers in a cave,
preoccupied with mere shadows of mere marionettes for they
knew only the cave and could not come and go between the sane
sunlight and the shadows. But no man can live entirely by the light
of reason and each of us holds within himself dark places of
retreat where reason finds fertile concourse with phantasy and
breeds anew.

It is a poet, Coleridge, who has argued most cogently for us the
conjunction between phantasy and reason in true Imagination,
and he has focussed a cluster of images into a garden poem which
is surely as much as the Ancient Mariner is a poem about the
birth of poetry itself, poetry whose springs are hidden but whose
rhythms are measured.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:

56

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

THE PICTURES AND POEMS MADE ON THE THEME OF CAVES

The paintings of caves from a student-teacher's class was one of
the thought-provoking experiences which led to this study. I was
astonished that this as much as any one of our themes should
provoke these results since some of the children had never even
seen a cave. I noticed that the treatment of this, more than most
themes, seemed to depend on the personality of the teacher. Some
were able even with few attractive visual features on t which .to,-
dwell/ to ejpfcIHe atmosphere which proved inspiring; others,
as successful with other themes, cdukTnot. Caves have in them-
selves so little necessary structure or form, their actual topography
is so often confusing and accidental looking. But where the intel-
lectual realisation of this fact brought from the teacher a
suggestion to Impose a form for a picture must have structure,
composition it destroyed the mystery. Where the idea was
allowed to evoke of some of its own profound mysteries, form
arose naturally.

Although it can seldom have been the dominant visual impres-
sion the image of retreating arches of colour was often used,
sometimes with a startling boldness and simplicity. This was
found equally in the pictures of a mine which was sometimes
linked with caves in the introduction as an alternative 1 and none
of these children had been down a mine. Many of the painters
represented the sensation of being in a cave rather than its appear-
ance and, on several occasions, the surface of the earth was shown
above. This is so in the strange archaic-looking vision (Illus. 15 a)
of the pale sun rising from behind a mountain almost filled by a
cave with tooth-like projections (stalactites and stalagmites?).
Inside the cave is what appears to be a monolith carved with
distinct features. This was a boy of low mentality in a secondary
modern school and the unconvincing conventionality and crudity

1 At the beginning of the year we used these, I still could hardly believe
that one did not have to make mo*e direct appeal to local and contemporary
interests, and I often gave the children the choice of a cave or a mine.

R.L. F 57

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

of the two top-hatted figures merely served to underline the
stark clarity of the main image. Their positions and their incon-
sistency of style with the rest of the picture almost seems to
suggest that they were pushed in at the last moment to give a
fallacious air of normality to the enigmatic whole (Cf. fig. 9a).

The group (Illus. i3a,b i6a) done at one time in Robert's class,
are so varied and interesting in their interpretation as to form a
striking example of the value of such a subject, which allows each
child a very personal interpretation. One cave is calm and spacious
with swelling stalagmites supporting the roof like the groins of
a gothic cathedral through which one's eye is led in weaving
convolutions; another, not shown, is full of black ravens and harsh
yellow and acid pink growths; one is pierced by up-thrusting
stalagmites like the devouring jaws of a crocodile; and one is cool,
tranquil and silvery, spiralling into a narrow aperture, the eye of
a needle through which one only penetrates in dreams.

Among the pictures from a set not otherwise outstanding in any
way, done in a secondary modern school under a sensible, stable,
rather motherly woman, is Illustration i5b on this theme. The
teacher, puzzled, told me how this little girl (a more intelligent
child might have suppressed her impulse, guessing that it might
be thought silly) Lad brought her this picture at the end of the
lesson saying, *I don't know why I put the cradle there but I
somehow felt there ought to be a baby in the cave.'

Contrast with those Marigold's 1 picture (Illus. i6b) which she
brought up for the praise for which she was so desirous even
when she had worked casually and which perhaps her rather
slick drawing had previously won for her. It was done in a class
among other quite moving paintings. This is a fairly typical
adolescent picture from a child who has been reading the maga-
zines and seeing the television usually provided for this group
we have all seen hundreds rather like it. But it was quite striking in
its difference from the other Caves and Mines done in this study.
This girl has obviously aot been able or willing to sink herself in
the experience of the mystery and depth of the cave. Not only has
she romanticised the idea of the Cave or Tunnel with the intro-

1 Marigold is the middle child of a family of three, and thus, most under-
standably, falls between the concentration of attention given by her parents
to the first child and their self-indulgence in spoiling the youngest, the only
boy in the family.

58

THE THEMES THEMSELVES

duction of the elaborately locked door, the key, the torch and so
on, but the children (herself and her phantasy playmate?) occupy
the centre of the page and capture all the attention by their colour
and style of painting which is in contrast to the rest of the picture.
It is as though she had to bring the idea of mystery and hidden
delight, which most children found in the idea of the cave itself,
on to the superficial plane of schoolgirl romances of the locked
room. The cave entrance is bricked up with a door, man-made,
and the picture's triviality emerges when compared with the man-
made mine (Illus. i4b) in which some of the primeval mystery
remains. She has reduced everything to the pretty level. In choos-
ing to paint thus, she may discover the pieces of eight, or even the
box of jewels this door suggests, but she will not find her own
origins. I suspect that she is not exploring reality but a romantic
substitute for it. 1

Apart from a very few superficial paintings like this, it will be
seen that, both in my own classes and in the other teachers', most
of the adolescents were exploring this Cave subject at a level
deeper than I had reached in my own thought consciously at
least. Because I recognised and now looking back I see how
slow I was to do some profound mystery in Caves I felt impelled
to pursue it further, but as usual, time and the general pressure of
life postponed this and it was not until I met this theme in another
context that I did so, as will be recounted in a later chapter of this
book.

1 Nevertheless, the subject of Treasure Trove is one which moves girls
deeply, if in a different way from boys. A history teacher friend has told me
how spell-bound her girls always sit when she relates the record of Sutton-
Hoo, how Mrs. Pretty had mounds in her garden and no one knew what was
inside till she invited the archaeologists to open them up, and how the large
mound contained a ship (Latin, navis, cf. nave of a church, nave, centre hub
of a wheel, navel) housing the cenotaph of a king and his golden treasure.

59

INTERLUDE

ON GARDENS

THE Interlude on Gardens traces another line of
thought which I had been pursuing from time to time
with growing interest. Being a rediscovery of the work
of artists and writers, not of children, it calls for a
different treatment. In the end it is found to illuminate
the first incident in the book and to illustrate the per-
sistence of a common theme in a set form throughout
the centuries.

Those who are more interested in the work in the
classroom in part two, may prefer to omit this interlude
at present, but the two levels of thought, in teaching
and in being led to new discoveries myself, are integral
to one another.

ON GARDENS

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he
put the man that he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord
God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food;
the tree of life also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the know-
ledge of good and evil.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it
parted and became four heads.

The Creation of the Garden of Eden as recorded in the Old Testament

Adam and Eve took one flower from Paradise. This, the rose, with all
its summer magic is grouped with autumn's amaranth symbolising
matured experience of an even greater fragrance than passion flowers.

The Starlit Dome, WILSON KNIGHT

The . . . Masters have left such frigid interpretations that there is little
encouragement to dream of Paradise itself.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

ONE summer evening, later, far from schools and students-
in-ttaining, I was sitting outside the miniature Tuscan
basilica of San Miniato high above Florence where I often
went to escape from the noisy city. A quiet-voiced brother broke
into my vacancy to inform me that I was shut in, the gates had
been closed an hour ago. After my apology, he led me through the
monks* garden, warm with the scent of herbs, and out of a little
gate ixi a high wall. I crossed the Piazzale Michelangelo and
strolled down to the city through the Boboli gardens with their trees
and statuary and fountains. The formal terraces of the gardens
were darkening swiftly and by the time I came to the river bank
(this was after the war in which most of the bridges had been
destroyed) the red flowers had gone blacker than the grey olives.
I stood cold and alone on the bank hopefully waiting for the ferry
supposed to operate at that point. Then, against the dark silhouette
of tie city much the same silhouette as Dante saw, with the thin
mullions of Giotto's campanile and the crenellated tower of the

INTERLUDE

Palazzo Vecchio poised in the sky there came a wavering light
rising and falling with the stream. A high-prowed boat with a lantern
at the stem approached silently out of the darkness. I scrambled
down a decaying pile of rubble, and mutely was handed into the
boat by a wrinkled old man whose eyes were almost hidden in his
bushy brows. Silently he poled us out towards the city side across
dark green water (pale sandy-green by daylight, its shallow volume
took on infinite depth by night). I sat in a trance, given up to this
strange sensation of travel, and when we reached the shore and
two black and white nuns loomed out of the darkness, lifting
their voluminous skirts to step daintily in, I indicated my wish to
return with them to the Boboli side. Again that trance-like
journey over the water: the slow withdrawal from the dark cliff
of buildings to the moment of poise in mid-stream and then all too
soon we were approaching the other bank. The nuns stepped out
and when I refused the boatman's claw-like hand and put instead
in it a triple fare, saying that I would return to the city, the old
man came close to me and peered into my face as though to
search for the motive of putting off so reluctant an arrival. But I
wished only to savour the journey, the cool air in my hair, the
swift passage of the dark water, and this Charon as I suddenly
saw him silently poling me back from the garden to the city. At
the worn steps I thanked him and made my way along the
Lungarno in that receptive state of mind induced by night
journeys over water,

My nose was full of scents and my mind dwelling casually on the
difference between the austere, practical herb-garden of the monks
and the wide pleasure terraces, the exotic trees and extravagant
Neptune fountain of the Boboli. Suddenly the 'rosegarden' of
Margaret, that funny collection of pieces of clay on a desk, came
to my mind. Why had a rosegarden come to her mind? How had
the whole idea of gardens come to men's minds?

I was woefully ignorant but I knew that rosegardens were a
favourite theme for poets, and the obvious c a green thought in a
green shade' and 'God wot, rose plot* sprang of course to my
mind. So at odd moments over the next weeks I read these and
other garden poems, but they had no power to lead me further.
However, discarding Thomas Edward Brown had sent me back to
his near-namesake, and I spent a delightful evening following the
arguments of old Sir Thomas Browne as to whether Noah or an-

S$ <L> . .
x.x oo <u
r-- o r i

H ^[IH

1 8 Christ The Gardener Greets Mary Magdalene, echoing the theme.
German, 1400.

19 (opposite) Humay with Her Maids

meets Humayan. *A flower-like stance'.

Persian, 1450.

22 Paradise Garden. Italian. Fifteenth century. Rose-trellis, formal fountain,

music.

Annunciation. Fra Angelico, 1440, laid in a garden portico, (b) and (<r) Dame
a la Licorne, the unicorn allegory in a garden setting.

24 Dame a la Licorne. The three scenes show, 23^) the Lady smiling, smells a rose,
23(V) Pensive, she lays her necklace in a casket. 24 With great sadness, she shows the
unicorn his face in a mirror where it is changed. He has lost his horn.

ON GARDENS

other was the first husbandman, and the discourse on the size and
shape of the 'decussated plots of the ancients'. Whether he is
arguing from ancient works and recorded wonders, or from what
is 'elegantly observable in severall works of nature' (the spider, or
teasle heads or leaves and sprouts which compasse not the stalk
and are often set in Rhomboids and Diagonals, do stand like the
leggs of quadrapeds when they goe'), Sir Thomas is reporting,
deducing, putting forth a balanced argument in his beautifully
ponderous prose. But at the end of the chapter comes a paragraph
in a different key.

i. Hyades near the Horizon,
about midnight at that
time.

2. De insomniis

3 . Artemodorus et Apomazar

4. Strewed with roses

But the Quincunx of Heaven
runs low, and 'tis time to close
the five ports of knowledge; We
are unwilling to spin out our
waking thoughts into the phan-
tasmes of sleep, which often con-
tinueth praecogltations; making
Cables of Cobwebbes and Wilder-
nesses of handsome Groves.
Besides Hippocrates hath spoken
so little and the OneireocrMcall
Masters have left such frigid
interpretations from plants that
there is little encouragement to
dream of Paradise itself. Nor will
the sweetest delight of Gardens
afford much comfort in sleep,
wherein the dulnesse of that sense
shakes hands with delectable
odours; and though in the Bed
of Cleopatra, can hardly with any
delight raise up the ghost of a
rose. 1

Surely it was not the fact that I grew drowsy that night toward
the end of the chapter, that from complete absorption in his Cyrus
garden the image of Margaret's 'rosegarden' drifted again into
my mind. It was something in the measured rhythm of the prose
which moved from rhetoric into the mood of evocation and

1 Sir Thomas Browne, c Cyrus Garden or the Quincunx* from The Works
ed. Chas. Sayle. Edinburgh, John Grant, 1927. First published 1658.

65

INTERLUDE

incantation. He leaves Hs attempt to trace 'delightful truths, con-
firmable by sense and oracular Observation, -which seems to me
the surest path to trace the Labyrinth of Truth', for another realm
and hints at the temptation 'to dream of Paradise itself'. I felt I had
drawn near something without getting a sight of it.

Sir Thomas was writing about twenty-five years after another
famous essay on gardens, so next day I turned it up, remembering
Bacon a little ruefully from schooldays. In his melodious recitation
of the lovely names he warms a little.

There followeth for the latter part of January and February
mezereon-tree which then blossoms; crocus vermis both the yellow
and the grey; primroses, anemones, the early tulippa, the hyacinthus
orientalis, chamairis, fritillaria.

But they remained a catalogue. For dry, precise Bacon would
relate them by geometry, and would shape a garden by arith-
metic four acres of ground to be assigned to the green, six to the
heath, four and four to either side for plots, and twelve to the main
garden. *In the very middle', he wishes, *a fair mount with three
ascents and alleys enough for four to walk abreast which I would
have in perfect circles.' Somehow for me the pattern was right but
the atmosphere was all wrong. What could I hope of a man who
dismissed roses as c fast of their scent* and spoke in the commercial
idiom of 'buying shade'?

This sort of garden did not have the right smell for me. Return-
ing to Sit Thomas Browne I followed up his clues from Virgil and
Pliny. Pliny the Elder, solemn and portentous, considered the
growing of vegetables and herbs as an obligation, since it was the
right and duty of every housewife and husbandman to be self-
sufficient. But pleasure gardens within a city he regarded with
suspicion, as 'curious and undesirable inventions'. This puritan
attitude to gardens was hardly one which would cast light on
Margaret's 'rosegarden*. But, only a generation later, this stern-
ness relaxes and the Younger Pliny is writing lovingly of his Villa
Tusci with its fine view of the Arno.

At this period I spent all my weekends in libraries pursuing any
clue which might throw light on rosegardens, I succumbed all too
often to intriguing diversions such as making pot-pourri 'take
a pound of petals, thyme, marjoram and musk' or trying out a
seventeenth century recipe for sugaring 'Frosted Rose Petals*.

66

ON GARDENS

Time outwitted indeed! The French herbalist, Pomet, provided a
fascinating diversion. *We make a liquid Conserve, Honey of
Roses, which is made of the fresh juice of Provins Rose and
Honey boiled together. Besides the Water (of Roses) there is a
fragrant inflammable Spirit made of Roses which is very proper
to refresh and exhilarate the spirits as well as strengthen the
Stomach ... the Roses which remain in the Alembrick, or Still,
after Distillation, and which is found like a cake in the Bottom,
being dried in the sun, we call Rose-Bread/ When I look at these
scraps of paper now I find cryptic messages to myself saying,
'Topiary, look up HYPERNOTOMACHAL 1499* or 'Bacon water
garden with claret wine?'

The sheaves of paper accumulated but the educational signi-
ficance eluded me. I could not begin to file these oddments
because I did not know what I was looking for. There was no
inherent pattern and I was reluctant to impose an arbitrary one
which would tidy them into files where they were removed from
the happy possibility of just that clue which I needed beckoning
me in an unguarded moment.

So, all these accounts of gardens, fascinating as they were, did
not sound the same bell for me as the 'rosegarden' of Margaret.
They seemed rather extensions of agriculture or of the villa (and
I saw how deeply Bacon had been influenced by his classical read-
ing). They were so sane, so urbane, so ordered. They all like
Browne's Cyrus 'brought the treasures of the field into rule and
circumspection*. Then I realised what they lacked magc.
Margaret had explicitly described her model as e a rosegarden*.
The gardens of the ancients which I had been pursuing, arising
first in Egypt from the practical need to control the Nile, to
terrace earth and canalise water, had not quite lost their practical
and utilitarian origin. They were chiefly concerned with the
growing of vegetables for food and trees for ftuit and shade.
Flowers there might be, especially after the sixth century B.C. in
Greece when the wearing of wreaths (unknown in Homer's time)
became more common, but utility and the healthy life seemed the
dominant aim.

Where could one find, not simply agriculture extended to in-
clude a meagre measure of flowers and herbs, but rather all that
was summed up in the word 'rosegarden*, the intensification of
delight, the overtones of poetry, above all the magic? I pinned up

67

INTERLUDE

round my room, to live with them, all the pictures of gardens
among my collection of prints. There were Egyptian water-
gardens stocked with fish and fowl, a few plans of classical
gardens, urbane frescoes from Pompeii, then historically a long
gap with only a few views of ordered monastic lay-outs, till
suddenly from the thirteenth century onwards a plentitude of
gardens in Books of the Hours, illustrations to Mediaeval poems
(iya, 6) and a growing number of religious scenes in gardens. Fra
Angelico's endearing Paradise Garden where the Blessed take part
in a kind of round dance (each blessed one between two angels as
though to accustom them gradually to a bliss too incredible to
those just come from earth). There was also a gtoup of the risen
Christ, not only mistaken for the gardener as in Angelico's
limpid scene, but actually wielding a spade (as in many German
carvings) (Illus. 18) or silhouetted in that cartwheel of a hat
which Rembrandt uses to throw up the light of the Easter
sunrise. 1 The urbane opulence of Renaissance gardens was quite
out of mood, but still showed the recurring motifs of fountains,
grottoes, rose-beds. More in harmony were Indian and Per-
sian garden scenes, meetings of Krishna and Rama, princes
receiving their guests, princesses repining for absent lovers or
exulting in secret meetings, with music, refreshments and always
the sound and sight of water and the flowers forever in bloom
(Illus. i9a).

The Persian miniatures above all others exemplified for me the
magic garden. Here was the epitome and quintessence of rose-
gardens. Here was order without rigidity, an intuitive identifica-
tion with plant and animal nature whose vigour just saved it from
languorous decadence. A sense of shared dependence of man,
creatures and vegetation on a common Source illuminated and
infused the mythic poems of that people (Illus. Frontispiece and
19).

While I responded to the vigour and vitality of the earlier
Persian work and especially to the close bond between men and
animals, it was the miniatures of the fifteenth century which
exemplified most fully my idea of the rosegarden theme. What
combination of fortunate circumstances at that time had produced

1 Thus echoing the Father-Creator of the Old Testament who figures
several times as a gardener, notably as the planter of a vineyard (Isaiah v.
1-17) which has a wall and a tower and a very fruitful hill.

68

ON GARDENS

this matchless zenith of an art providing the illuminations for a
poetry recited to music and which can themselves only be
described in terms of music and poetry. 1

These Persian artists have found forms which evoke in me an
emotion sharing some essential element with that aroused by such
widely different arts as Mediaeval romances and Byzantine
ornament. One scholar writes (cf. Hlus. 19):

The action is, as it were, seen with the eye of heaven. Some may
suspect in front of these mortal combats on flowery meadows a
sentimentalism which would spread a veil of poetical unreality over
everything. But consider such a scene as the meeting of Humay and
Humayan in the garden, where flowers are in fact an essential part of
the subject as illustration. What has happened? The flowers are not
a background: they are in the forefront of the picture: it is the human
figures which are subordinated to the extent of having taken on a
flower-like stance in arrested expectancy. Here we are shown the
scene of the lovers' meeting as it might have appeared to themselves
in recollection. 2

In another picture a manuscript of poems is presented to a
young prince seated in a garden, a favourite subject. The fountain
pool is fluted like a flower itself, and the fence, here more solid, is
entered through an arched gate, which emphasises the e closed*
aspect of the garden while allowing us to see over the low wall.
Dark compact cones of cypresses poised on slender stems are used

1 The conquest of Ghengis Khan and the Mogul hordes which followed
him, destroyed the libraries and dispersed the courts so that the fine arts,
closely concentrated on these centres, should logically have disappeared.
But with astonishing vitality, the hieratic Persian style of figures formally
placed without a background not only survived the conquest and inclusion in
the Greater Empire, it absorbed the Chinese influence to which that opened
the gates. The nervous calligraphic Chinese line, the essential setting of
figures within a background, refined and elaborated the traditional Persian
style. Drawing on this double heritage, the formal elements remain in the
composition, but the drawing is enlivened by sensitive line, till in a copy of
The Book of Kings of the second quarter of the fourteenth century these are
fused in a perfect matching of figure and landscape, of vigour and delicacy.
It is a moment to compare with the brief life of Giorgione when first in
European painting human beings were placed in full relationship with the
world of nature, which as a living entity contains them, both setting and
reciprocating their mood. This also is a world in which music evokes the
mood and hints at deeper overtones we hear but can never describe.

2 Basil Gray, Introduction in Persian Painting. Batsford.

INTERLUDE

to encircle and isolate the separate flowers of the almond so that
one is led to look at each individual blossom, even at each indi-
vidual petal with its pink heart. In another garden scene, the host
is gracefully bending the branch of a bush behind his head to
smell a rose. To a cultured Arab 'the abode of felicity* was the
enclosed garden with high walls, sweet-smelling trees and, above
all, flowing water. Yet far behind this idea of a garden as a
sanctuary, is the idea of the 'temenos', the sacred place, which was
within a magic circle, where one could come to no harm. Such
miniatures are so perfectly composed that one can enjoy the
patterned effect from the distance, even turn them upside down to
appreciate more fully the balance of forms, of flat areas and of
detail; one can peer into the jewelled perfection of each quarter
inch, or follow the subtle paths through which the eye is led (as
by the white blobs of the turbans or the silver-grey angular
fence), before returning to an imaginative participation in the
story.

For a thousand years, from the sixth to the seventeenth century, 1
there are recurring elements in these garden scenes, the wall with
a narrow, usually arched, opening, the central pool or fountain,
from which streams or paths run at right angles, the flowering
rather than fruit-bearing trees, and always roses. 'Of the flowers,
the rose, constant simile of Persian poets, was the queen,' 2
as Sheba was the Rose of Sharon. Remembering the elaborate
walls in Margaret's model, I was interested to find confirmed 3
that the Persian garden is invariably surrounded by a wall, for it
is a retreat and privacy is of its very essence.

Also, Christopher Sykes writes: 4

What can be said is that the Persian garden owes its character and its
great beauty to the fact that it springs from a vital need . . . the
Persian garden is a refuge from the all-surrounding waste. . . . The
garden-making of Persia is the most unself-conscious of arts, but . . .
there are certain conventions which, like the Unities of French
drama, are rarely departed from. The garden must be surrounded by
high walls, must have as its centre feature a pool [or fountain]

1 Phyllis Ackerman and Upham-Pope, Survey of Persian Art. New York,
1938. 2 The Starlit Dome, p. 122.

3 Phyllis Ackerman and Upham-Pope, Survey of Persian Art.

4 'Persian Gardens', Geographical Magazine, Dec. 1957.

70

ON GARDENS

must if possible have running water, must contain shady trees, and
must have soft green grass. The princely gardens of Tehran ... all
share these essentials with the poorest hovel . . . poets tell of roses
and nightingales there . . .

Our knowledge of earlier Persian gardens is obtained from the
'garden carpets'. In the days of Croesus I, the most important of
the Sassanid princes, a marvellous carpet was woven, sixty yards
square, of which we have a description.

The ground represented a pleasure garden, with streams and paths,
trees and beautiful spring flowers. The wide border all round showed
flower-beds of various colourings, the 'flowers* being blue, red,
yellow or white stones. The ground was yellowish to look like earth,
and was worked in gold. The edges of the streams were worked in
stripes; and between them, stones bright as crystal gave the illusion
of water, the size of the pebbles being what pearls might be. The
stalks and branches were gold or silver, the leaves of the trees and
flowers were made of silk like the rest of the plants, and the fruits
were coloured stones.

The Arabs brought their culture to Europe with them and in
Spain and Sicily we can get an impression of what their courts
were like. One hot day, I myself wandered through the dusty,
poverty-stricken suburbs of Palermo keeping to the shady side of
the pavement and picking my way over the old people crouched
on doorsteps and the stretched legs of children too languid to run
around, until I found the peeling ruin of La Zisa, a pavilion built
by Arab workmen for one of the Norman kings of Sicily. To enter
the cool arched hall with its stalactite form of building was like
entering a grotto and down the centre ran the gold mosaic'd
channel which should have held cool water in which to dip the
feet. No water ran there now, but round the walls peacocks,
symbols of immortality, fronted the tree of life in the timeless
brilliance of mosaic. Although what should have been the garden
in which this pavilion stood was all built over now with sordid
streets, I still got some insight into what water, coolness and the
blessed shade of trees could mean in a dusty land. In that place
I also first grasped how the Arabs related house and garden,
bringing water and plants into the pavilion, and conversely tak-
ing cool shelter and comfort out into the garden, a relationship
never again so perfectly achieved till eighteenth-century England

71

INTERLUDE

developed its landscaped grounds, balconies and terraces suited
to a colder climate.

Turning again to the Persian miniatures, I was reminded
inevitably of the only thing in western European art perhaps
truly comparable with them, the faded pink tapestry, sprinkled
with just spring flowers, of La Dame a la Licorne seen years ago
in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. I knew of course that the fable of
the unicorn, the wild creature who can only be captured by a
virgin in whose lap he lays his head, was an allegory. But why was
the scene kid in a garden, and just such a garden of frail flowers,
panoplied pavilions, seclusion for tender meetings as one finds in
so many of the Arab romances and in the European poetry of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (for the designer of this
tapestry, woven in the early sixteenth century, was deliberately
using, like Spenser and Breughel, an archaic mode to give the
'distance' which brings his symbolic statement into focus).

Though gardens had been known long before, it was the
Crusaders who brought home tales of the fabulous gardens of the
Orient, and the passion for gardens, bursting like a frostbound
bud in a warm wind from the east, extended European life in the
many directions implicit in the idea of a pleasaunce. But there was
little space inside the walls necessary in these troubled centuries
for a garden extension to a pinnacled castle or to a battlemented
town, and so the gardens were often places at some distance from
the castle and enclosed against the forest beasts. When we do find
a castle garden, it is usually, as in the one on which Nicolette's
prison room looked down, 'strict and close'. She herself of course
was brought 'from the land of the Saracens*.

In the garden from her room
She might watch the roses bloom,
Hear the birds make tender moan;
Then she knew herself alone. 1

But the form of the Mediaeval garden was fixed and crystallised
for centuries by the authors of the 'Komaunt de la Rose, the separate
garden entered by a c wiket smal' with high walls and arbours,
with flowers and rose bushes and 'trees from the land of the
Saracens'. Such gardens, repeating the same conventions, the
walls, arbours, the rosetrees, became the setting for a hundred

1 A.ucassin and Nicoktte, translated from the French by Eugene Mason.

72

ON GARDENS

stories of romantic love. We know their appearance from the
illustrations to the Romaunt de la Rose and other romances the
fountain in the centre, the rose arbour, the turf seats (Illus. iyb,

20b).

The Courts of Love were often held in gardens and the scene
became so intimately bound up with the tender feelings that the
Garden of Love becomes a conventional symbol. In the mid-
fifteenth century ojcie of the earliest copperplate engravings shows
'a Garden of Love', walled with clumps of trees, flowers, a fence
to lean on and hexagonal table spread with fruit and wine.

Now it is an extraordinarily interesting fact that this hexagonal
table spread with fruit and wine and several other elements of this
Garden of Love appear almost identically in the Paradise Garden
of a German Master, painted about 1410 (Illus. 21). Here Our
Lady, a doll-like girl, reading in a book, happily leaves the Christ
child to play on the grass with a zither, and an angel lounges,
conversing with two men in easy familiarity, while the Evil One,
reduced to a harmless baby dragon, lies stretched with its pathetic
paws in the air. The pool of water is there, the apple tree echoing
another age of innocence the crenellated walls and the carpet of
flowers.

But a more profound and perhaps the loveliest of all Taradise
Gardens' is that by Stephano da Verona (Illus. 22), in which the
feeling of enclosure is emphasised by the small area of the garden
and the roses trained over the high walls and the trellises in the
foreground which almost close the shape, seeming to encircle the
Virgin. The long blue tails of two peacocks again the immortal
birds themselves like angels, lead the eye up to the apex of the
triangle of blue robe, to the high forehead above the quiet face.
The fountain is a sophisticated gothic structure in gold, and in the
midst of all the angelic activity the Virgin sits, child in lap, in
a dreamy meditation, aureoled by delicate rays and stars.

So the Garden of Love has become the Garden of Our Lady,
and one may ask why it was this the Arabian garden tradition
and not the other, the JLoman, a useful orderly garden of vegetable
plots, which provided the image? The idea of that same Roman
garden survived, if tenuously, through the so-called Dark Ages,
and was given fresh impetus by the Benedictines (who ate no
meat and in whose gardens the central pool or fountain was a fish-
pond). The Carthusians also spread both their knowledge of

R.L. G 73

INTERLUDE

horticulture and their belief in the contemplative virtues of
gardening as their Houses stemmed out over Europe. It cannot
have been that this practical man-made garden (as opposed to the
heavenly or magic garden) did not lend itself to Christian imagery,
for already in the eighth century, Rhabus Maurus had taken the
garden, 'because there is always something growing there*, as
a symbol of the Christian church, Vhich bears so many divers
fruits of the spirit and in which flows the sacred fount of healing*.
But obviously this image, in key with the staid matronly Madonna
of the early Christian frescoes, 1 was not appropriate to the delicate
adorable Madonna who was the ideal of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Two images, that of the spiritual mediator,
the mother of God, and that of the queen or lady of the Trouba-
dours who must be served, worshipped and loved without
requital, had coalesced. The lady of the "Komaunt de la Rose, a
spiritual allegory in the form of a love story, is indistinguishable
from the Madonna of the Rosegarden.

This theme of the Virgin as the lover figure had been lightly
woven through the Mediaeval Latin lyrics, and something of the
full compass of the images fused in the person of Mary are
apparent in the Litany of Loreto. Here we find her described not
only by her age-old titles (just how old I was gradually beginning
to suspect) of 'Stella maris* 'Rosa mundi/ She is also "Hortus
Conclusus' 'an Enclosed Garden'. 2 This 'enclosed garden 5 image
is weighted with its full significance in certain Madonna pictures
such as Fra Angelico's Annunciation into whose light one comes
suddenly at the top of the stairs in San Marco, Florence (Illus. 23).
That the scientific spirit and devotion to the new knowledge did
not necessarily supersede religious faith is demonstrated clearly
in this picture. Fra Angelico shows his gentle Lady seated under
a colonnade with corinthian capitals (the latest of the classic orders,
as though to suggest that the true fulfilment of the classics is now

1 She is echoed in the 'Roman matron madonna' of Niccolo Pisano's pulpit
at Pisa, one of the earliest Renaissance sculptures inspired by Roman fragments
lying around the baptistry.

2 In Psychology and Alchemy (p. 70) Jung shows a seventeenth-century
illustration in Prinzs' Altoreitalische Symbolik, which represents the Virgin
on a horned moon 'surrounded by her attributes the quadrangukr enclosed
garden, the round temple, tower, gate, well and fountain, palms and cypresses
(trees of life), all feminine symbols'. Psychology and Alchemy is rich in illus-
trations of this thesis.

74

ON GARDENS

attained in Christianity). The colonnade is set within a garden
strictly fenced outside are woods, inside are grass and flowers.
The round-arched colonnade, which forms a little arbour within
the garden, is treated with complete simplicity echoing the
simplicity of this Virgin. But the symbolic use of perspective in
this scene combines an intellectual passion with tender feeling.
Perspective to Fra Angelico was the perfect system of represent-
ing a scene from one viewpoint (and we forget how recent was
this conception: Mediaeval and early Renaissance painting shows
many viewpoints and incidents of different times within one
picture). The perspective 1 which Renaissance men had invented,
did for Angelico but mirror the divine viewpoint from which all
things fell into place. This divine order is again suggested by the
perfect balance of the picture, the two figures inclined towards one
another in a holy concord. Perhaps the pillar of the arcade between
them represents the division between heaven and earth, for above
it is elevated a circle, the key signature indicating the mood of the
whole painting, forming an essential link in the composition and
in the situation. The utter stillness is pregnant with meaning,
the circle is 'the still centre' suspended in space and time for
us to realise this glorious moment. The Virgin does not twist
away in shocked humility as in the earlier Simone Martini
Annunciation at Siena, nor is divine condescension emphasised by
an earthy or even ugly madonna as in later work of Brueghel. This
is the moment of perfect balance, of divine stooping and human
upraising, of divine giving and human acceptance.

It is interesting to notice that except in specific association with
the Virgin there are very few true gardens in early or high
Italian painting. 2 Even where the subject is the Madonna she is
more often, in out-of-door scenes, placed in a meadow than a
garden, and Francia's Madonna of the Roses has only a frail trellis of
roses separating her from gentle landscape. The Madonna by
Raphael in the Louvre, called significantly La Belle Jardiniere, is in
a meadow. The garden of Olives and the garden of the Sepulchre

1 Uccellos' wife said of him that he would sit up at nights and not come
to bed because he was wedded to Perspective.

2 One exception is the gatden in which the wot Idly revellers sit in Traini's
Triumph of Death in the Camposanto in Pisa. Perhaps it was inspired by
Boccaccio's garden of Pampona which was also an enclosure, a flight from
plague and death.

75

INTERLUDE

are usually represented as extensions of natural landscape not
vastly different from it.

It was in the Arab countries then, wrested desperately from
the desert, or in northern Europe, fenced in against the encroach-
ing forests with wild beasts, that the high-walled garden, and
therefore the quintessence of the /^mr-garden (refuge, magic or
sacred place) is fully apparent. This feeling that the garden was
over against the natural world lasted in the north through the
Elizabethan garden, and the seventeenth-century garden as des-
cribed by Evelyn. It was only with the draining of fens, the cutting
of forest, the developments in agriculture in the eighteenth
century, that the enclosed pleasance opened its walls (develop-
ing the ha-ha to make this apparent) until the garden led by
graduated steps through parkland into the country.

Yet the juxtaposition to desert or forest defined by its wall
(underlining its enclosed quality) is an element in the idea of a
garden which even to this day survives in poetry and art, in for
instance The Four Quartets and Paul Klee's garden pictures. From
almost the earliest human records, the Egyptian Island of the Blest,
Elysium, the Garden of the Hesperides with 'the apple-tree, the
singing and the gold', the Garden of Eden with its angel-guarded
gate, the Persian myth of the Garden of Yima where the germs of
life are preserved, all the garden theme echoes a poignant desire
for fulfilment amidst the confusion and accidents of life.

The wall encloses the desirable, the beautiful, the ordered, shutting
them off from wildness and tough weather. Eden was the more
Eden when it was 'spiked with palisade' ... If Mediaeval poetry is
full of such paradises temporarily regained, gardens e set with the lily
and with rose', it is because they were the Mediaeval response to the
perennial human need for a Tir-na-n'Og, a land of heart's desire
where 'flies no sharp and sided hail'. They are such stuff as dreams
are made on. 1

That Margaret's garden bore so little relationship to the visual
appearance of the gardens she knew (and she must have had a
great stock of flower, tree and other images if she had wished to
use them) is now explained for me by the fact that what she was
doing was re-creating a symbol, a focus through which her ideas
and feelings could play. Her symbol is like those referred to by
1 Bennett, The Parlement ofFottles, p. 50.

76

ON GARDENS

Kenneth Clark 1 when he says, 'We must admit that the symbols
by which early Mediaeval art acknowledged the existence of
natural objects bore unusually little relation to their actual
appearance/ Jung says that the
more fully an object is func-
tioning as a symbol the less it
needs to resemble the actual
thing.

In writing on my experiences
in following, through the
intervening years, the garden
theme, I have been tracing
some of the associations that
any one of the children's
works might have opened
up. If I have chosen this FIG. i. The Fountain in the walled

L i i ^i i , r garden. From Boschrus. Ars Symbohca

rather than, say, the history of & ' J

peacock symbolism, which was equally fascinating, it is because
I hope the garden will be of interest to a greater number of
readers of English.

If I had known then as much as I do now about the rosegarden
tradition in European art and literature, I would have recognised
the mode in which she was working and I might have been able to
help her much more. But

The masters have left such frigid interpretations . . . that there is

little encouragement to dream of Paradise itself.

Pondering on the need for our scientific age to recognise these
truths which can only be portrayed in symbolic form and to
pause in contemplation of them for they do not reveal them-
selves in rushed living or high-pressure teaching I found the
Song of Songs and the litanies echoed in the tapestry of La
Dame a la Licorne. Looking back at her, who even in repro-
ductions bridges the centuries with her grave gaze, an invocation
to her for that wisdom, without which knowledge is lethal, took
word-shape in my mind. 2

1 Landscape into Art, chap. I. Penguin, 1950.

2 These six tapestries, probably woven for a betrothal, have as one aspect
of their symbolism the five senses. But since so little is known of their full
meaning, and since the expression on the Lady's face varies so suggestively,
it does not seem unjustified to comment on what they mean to one observer.

77

INTERLUDE

LA DAME A LA LICORNE

Sweet Damozel,

Trysting with eternal Eden

Wearing circle of seed pearls.

Your jewelled zone is yours alone
Not to yield to strength or stealth
Conceal your wealth,
Guard your treasure
For love's measure only,
Awaiting the white horn.

Gentle Dame,

Mary of the tented isle

Paradise is nuptial ground.

Lay your rose-ring by, enclosing
In casket deep, while around
Proud Lion, guileless Unicorn
Keep guard

While holy seedling sleeps
Waiting to be born.

Sage Donna, wise,
With Anna's eyes,
Robed in faded roses* hue
Woman pierced by man's probe
Bide your time, bear the seed
Share man's pain since you must store
Against man's need in weal and woe
Wisdom's dark light.

We reel with power to gore the moon
Our stark plight crowns history's score
To festering core we close our eyes.

Lady, to heal our plight
Unseal your lore
Reveal your Mystery
Soon, I implore.

S.M.R. 1961

PART TWO

PART two comprises a discussion of symbols, the descrip-
tion of a class of teachers, showing the power of the symbol
to lead us to another level of experience, and a brief review
of the implications of this fact for us as teachers.

CHAPTER SIX
SYMBOLS

A man that looks on glass,
On it may stay his eye,
Or if he pleaseth through it pass. . . .
The Elixir ', GEORGE HERBERT

The arts represent a human need and they rest on a trait quite unique
in man, the capacity for symbolism.

Art and Technics, LEWIS MUMFORD

IN this way, through the study of adolescents' pictures and
models, and of past works of art on similar themes, it slowly
became apparent to me, as doubtless it has long since to the
reader, that most of these boys and girls were using the suggested
themes symbolically. Yet when the subject had originally been
suggested to them by my students or myself (before the list had
been drawn up), no such thought had been in our minds. I have
traced how this conviction emerged for me through my observa-
tion of a different mood in the class and an exceptional degree of
concentration while working; through a personal satisfaction in
the results out of proportion to the actual achievement, as though
those painters were actually seeing through the work to some-
thing beyond it; and through the effect of the finished work on
myself and others, which acted like an incantation in poetry or the
rhythms of Buddhist or Byzantine art, suggesting much more than
it stated.

Although the simplicity and rather primitive crudity of the
forms in some cases give these works a certain superficial re-
semblance to the schemata used by young children (and may be
mistaken for them) they differ in essentials. They also differ
radically from visual images although they have of course
certain elements derived from visual perception. The distinguish-
ing quality of visual images, a fresh awareness of things as seen> an

81

SYMBOLS

individual, personal vision, is outweighed here by the 'universal'
and intuitive character of these images. These, like tradition, are
'more than one man deep'. They have the possibility, not so much
of extending our vision by projecting someone else's in front of us
as visual images do, as of deepening it to levels which were always
there in us but of which we were hardly aware.

In drawing up the final list it became apparent that the Themes
fell into groups of natural and man-made objects, of people, and
of beasts. It was apparent that many had a rather archaic flavour
which, as I have noted, made me question their value for modern
adolescents. Nevertheless, I could not ignore their power to
produce this intense state of concentration from which the painters
and modellers emerged in some way changed, renewed, more
centred^ Through my own experiences in teaching during that
year, and through the work produced on them by the group of
teachers co-operating, I became convinced that these Themes had
the potentiality of focussing meanings and associations far beyond
their overt subject and of serving as symbols for many different
kinds of people. In painting the caves (Illus. 13-16) (which lose
immeasurably through lack of the colour which reveals their
mood and often mystery) these adolescents have, to different
degrees, used the opportunity offered by this theme to explore,
not only their own memories of actual caves, not only the dragon-
haunted treasure-guarding caves of our literature, but sensations
of darkness and enclosure, of losing one's daylight personality in
finding a way into the earth, 'mother-earth', and into hidden and
lost experiences of the individual and the race.

Any subject may serve as a symbol for one individual, becom-
ing loaded with personal associations and capable of touching
strong emotions through some pattern in his own history. But
these themes were evidently able to do this for whole classes, even
when neither children nor teacher were aware of their full
significance. I could not be content with my own enjoyment in the
work, but must as a teacher pursue this question of symbols.

Children's pictures and models had often sent me back to soak
myself in the poetry which they suggested, but I had never found
much time to read literary criticism. Now, the need to understand

1 A work on any subject about which the artist feels intensely can do this
of course. My point is that these Themes tended for ordinary people to
effect this concentration and satisfaction more often than did others.

82

SYMBOLS

mote fully demanded it. The exploration of symbols in the work
of the great poets showed how autobiography or letters might
reveal incidents which explained how an object came to play the
part of a symbol in the life of one particular man, whose work only
communicates fully to us when we know this. But the symbol
which is more-than-personal, which is common to us all, had also
been explored. In 1927, Gilbert Murray, comparing Hamlet and
Orestes, spoke of the great stories and situations which are
'deeply implanted in the memory of the race'. Such themes when
we meet them may be new to us, 'yet there is that within us which
leaps at the sight of them, a cry of the blood which tells us that we
have known them always'. 1

Jung has shown that symbols which are, as it were, the great
types of human functioning the archetypes keep cropping up
in universal forms, such as the Great-Mother-Goddess, the Wise-
Old-Man, the Paradise-Hades image. They may take their form
through the experience of a community in whose history the
theme has arisen such as the Biblical Flood, a destroying and
cleansing force; or they may embody philosophical concepts
such as the Paradise-Hades image which might arise in human
consciousness at any time or place. 2

A struggle during these years with many of the volumes of Jung,
as they were successively translated into English, gave me some
inkling of the profundity of the field, and brought an intuitive
response but never complete understanding. A change of mood,
or the production of a picture such as the snaky sea, would send
me back in relief to the poetry itself, and I marvelled at the power
of Coleridge's deceptively simple language to contain the turgid
images of the sultry sea, the star-dogged moon, the bloody sun.
Immersion in the poem would give way to a mood of enquiry
again, and thus I found Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Images in
"Poetry. She sets out to investigate a thesis thrown out by Jung that
the fundamental appeal of certain great poems rests on their
evocation of an archetypal theme: for instance in The Ancient
Mariner and The Waste "Land the Rebirth theme, and in Paradise

1 Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes. Ckssical Traditions in Poetry.
O.U.P., 1927.

2 Phyllis, whose progress is traced in the Appendix I, summed up her
needs and yearnings in her painting *The Wise Old Man of the East* in
an east London slum school though she had never heatd of archetypes.

83

SYMBOLS

'Lost the Paradise-Hades image. From her study of poetry, as Jung
did from a lifetime's study of unconscious motives and forces, she
concludes that there are themes of such eternal durability that they
are truly archetypal, and have a particular form or pattern (which
persists amid variations from age to age) and which corresponds
to a configuration of emotional responses in the minds of those
who are stirred by the theme. The Water and Cave themes on
which we had stumbled seemed to me such subjects, and noting
her words that a profound response to great poetic themes can be
secured only by living with such themes, dwelling and brooding
on them when the mind is open to their influence, I hoped that we
had been encouraging just that.

She was studying, as was Gilbert Murray, great poems and
dramas, in which the primordial images had found worthy
expression and in which the poet's power to move us arose from
his language being matched to the depth of his theme.

I was concerned not with the work of poets or artists but of
adolescents and untaught adults who had neither the insight nor
the technique to paint or compose masterpieces. Yet even their
efforts when working on these themes had a sense of depth and
significance which urged me to this study. The work illustrated
varies greatly in its control of the medium and in its accomplish-
ment. But its fundamental appeal does not lie in these. Even of
masterpieces Gilbert Murray wrote:

In plays like Hamlet or the Agamemnon or the Ekctra we have cer-
tainly fine and flexible character study, a varied and well wrought
story, a full command of the technical instruments of the poet and
the dramatist; but we have also, I suspect, a strange, unanalysed
vibration below the surface, an underlying current of desires and
fears and passions, long slumbering yet eternally familiar, which
have for thousands of years lain near the root of our most intimate
emotions and been wraught into the fabric of our most magic
dreams. 1

Some of the children's work which revealed their magic dreams
had, even when crude and unskilled, more power to move than
works of technical competence, and confirmed our common
fund of archetypes.

1 Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes. Classical Traditions in Poetry.
O.U.P., 1927

84

SYMBOLS

I am, however, a teacher, and very much less concerned with
the effect of these pictures and models on us who look at them
than with their effect on the makers themselves. When they had
worked quickly and surely in this mood of complete absorption,
their satisfaction was not damped by lack of technical skill. But
the essential condition was that the teacher should accept the
'primitiveness* of the work. I saw cases where this was so but
where the adolescent was so conscious of standards of realism in
the world outside school to which he aspired, that he continued
to be self-critical even when his teacher was encouraging. But I
never saw a pupil who could continue to be satisfied with the
result (however much he had enjoyed the experience) if his teacher
was disapproving. 1 She alone can create the atmosphere of per-
missiveness in which the class can let themselves go down into
those depths of the self at which symbols operate.

The acceptance of symbols demands from each of us a standing
aside of what has been called by Marion Milner c the discriminating
ego*. Speaking of the necessity for normal growth of symbol-
formation through the identification of one thing with another,
she writes 2 :

The basic identifications which make it possible for us to find the
familiar in the unfamiliar [Wordsworth's phrase for poetry] require
a temporary giving up of the discriminating ego which stands aside
and tries to see all things objectively and rationally and without
emotional colouring.

Perhaps it requires [she goes on] a state of mind described by
Berenson as e the aesthetic moment'.

c ln visual art the aesthetic moment is that fleeting instant moment,
so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is one with
the work of art he is looking at. He ceases to be his ordinary self, and
the picture or building, statue, landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no
longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time and space
are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness. When
he recovers workaday consciousness it is as if he had been initiated
into illuminating, formative mysteries!'

1 A searing account is given in Joyce Gary's Charlie is my Darling of the
undermining of Charlie's pride and satisfaction in his crude but vital drawing
of a bull by the vague disapproval of his prissy teacher.

2 M. Milner, 'The Role of Illusion in Ego-Formation', an article in New
Directions in Psycho-analysis Tavistock Publications, 1955.

85

SYMBOLS

Her comment is that we know that the boundaries exist each
of us is aji organism within its boundaries in a world of other
organisms within boundaries but the young child does not: c lt
is only gradually and intermittently that he discovers them; and on
the way to this he uses play. Later, he keeps his perception of the
world from becoming fixed, and no longer capable of growth, by
using art, either as an artist or audience/

Surely all our lives we should keep our perception of the world
from becoming incapable of growth, but in adolescence, when the
physical and emotional development is in a state of fluid unrest,
and yet pressures from both school and work tend to tie one down
to being more objective, more definite, this experience is crucial
for the flexible growth of the self. 1 If we cultivate in school only
the discriminating ego which stands apart and looks at things
objectively, then we cut off children from the possibility of losing
themselves temporarily in the work of a mind much greater and
richer than their own from experiencing that aesthetic moment
which is one of the nodal points of education. But more important,
we cut them off from the creative experience of tapping all the
differing layers of their own being through shaping a symbolic-
image a fusion of many related aspects existing on physical,
emotional, intellectual and spiritual levels. And the symbols they
use may bring them not only into a relationship with unsuspected
depths in themselves but also with such tap-roots in others
through the common traditions of race or humanity.

In order to find this new meaning, we have, as it were, to loosen
our coercive hold of the old. One may have some recognition that
one's actual mother was a supremely formative influence,
worthy even of the sort of veneration associated with the tradi-
tional notion of a goddess. But it is not till one ceases to concen-
trate the feeling and to confine the word to this physical, actual,
bodily relationship, till one pushes off from the familiar to face the
expanse of the unfamiliar, that a university can truly become an
alma mater, or a country a motherland, or that a hint of the terror
and magnificence of the ancient Mother-Goddess image we each
of us bear inwardly, can illuminate our whole relationship with

1 A sociologist as objective as David Riesman points out, in The Lonely
Crowd, 'While the children's paintings and montages show considerable
imaginative gift in the pre-adolescent period, the school itself is an agent in
the destruction of phantasy/

SYMBOLS

the other sex. I believe that adolescents have an instinctive (and
I use the word advisedly) feeling that chaos must be gone through
in order that a new order may come. Sometimes, when they dis-
play this sense of turmoil in their dress, in their vacillation, in
their painting, we become impatient and impress or demand an
ordered form before it arises from the depths of themselves. This
is as true of art as of manners and of morals. The artist knows this
chaos which must be undergone if things are to rearrange them-
selves organically according to some pattern which echoes another
Order. He also knows the destruction (of a white canvas, of a
trim block of wood, of a bar of precious metal) which must be
accepted if he is to create something new. Keats made a positive
affirmation about this chaos when he wrote to his brothers:

. . . several things dove-tailed in my mind, and it at once struck me
what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in
literature which Shakespeare possessed so enormously I mean
Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after
fact and reason. 1

He also found the resolution of this state in the great poems which
embody unforgettable symbolic-images, L,a Belle Dame sans
Merci^ Endymion, Autumn.

As teachers we should be concerned to provide opportunities
for a kind of melting down of the hard edges of objects and of
ideas, of a dissolving of differing layers of experience into one
another, till apparently unlike things interfuse, dovetail, and
finally interlock in one clear pregnant image. This is how a symbol
arises.

On reflection, it need not surprise us too much that in the
second half of the twentieth century, an age of electricity, nuclear
power, earth satellites, such themes as fire, water, woods, should
still fire the imagination and bear this symbolic overtone. All the
evidence from archaeology and anthropology seems to suggest
that such technical advances have left the human mind very much
the same. In addition, it seems that new inventions hardly ever
take on this power of symbolic role for the whole social group
unless they can be linked with some former, related symbol,

1 Keats 9 'Letters. No. 45 in the H. E. Rollins edition, published Harvard
Press, 1958.

8?

SYMBOLS

gathering to themselves its associated power. A modern queen,
however powerless politically, however insignificant as a person,
bears an aura of queenship derived from thousands of years of real
power. An aeroplane is primarily a powerful engine of flight, but
it also carries associations of conquest of the sides formerly
reserved for gods and angels!

Every age must express itself in its own terms and its own
language but the underlying symbols prove to be very much the
same. It is not to be expected that adolescents will invent new
symbols. 1 What we can expect them to do is to find their own
individual image for a traditional symbol, and reinforce the sense
of their unique personality and their common heritage in one and
the same activity. I believe that it is this experience which pro-
duces that sense I noted of being centred, rooted: balanced on
one's own mainspring, and rooted in that which is deeper than

oneself.

In a different age or a different civilisation, I would not have had
to stumble accidentally across the importance of these themes, nor
to struggle to free myself from my own upbringing to accept
them. The themes of which I have been speaking would have been
the normal in fact sometimes the only subject for art. The
Interlude on Gardens showed how widely that theme was
accepted in Europe and the Near East for over six hundred years.
One writer 2 goes so far as to say that the garden theme almost is
mediaeval European civilisation. While it is true that we know
the rosegarden and cave themes though not, e.g., the labyrinth,
water, bird, animal, or queen-goddess themes more through
literature than through the visual arts, they need not for that
reason be damned as too literary' for painting. It is when the
style of a painting is literary or anecdotal that one begins to
question. The truth is that they are fundamental themes, capable
of inspiring any of the arts, but that dances and ritual dramas,
relying on performance for their perpetuation, have often been
lost.

1 'The living symbol cannot come to birth in an inert or poorly developed
mind, for such a man will rest content with the already existing symbols
offered by established tradition. Only the passionate yearning of a highly
developed mind, for whom the dictated symbol no longer contains the
highest reconciliation in one expression, can create a symbol.' Jung, Psycho-
logical Types.

2 Bennett, The Parkment ofFou/es, chap. I. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957.

SYMBOLS

I have written elsewhere 1 about the potency of tradition, and
the way in which a living tradition bears up quite ordinary people
who serve as channels for its spirit. Korei Celedon pottery is
acclaimed as one of the highest forms of art. Yet we hardly know
the name of one of the potters. Those simple, humble folk, work-
ing almost as labourers without self-consciousness, achieved such
heights because they were relying on a tradition to which they
were heirs. They were in accord with it in two ways. They used
traditional motifs or themes, and, through hundreds of years,
thought it sufficient to paint the bamboo or the cherry rather than
find new subjects, because these were loaded with symbolic mean-
ing for them and for the users of their pots. They used traditional
forms (both of pottery and in the sense of images), showing
superb skill but varying them only so far as spontaneous brush
strokes vary.

The adolescents of whom I have been speaking have no valid
traditional/0n#.r in which to work. The inherited forms of folk art
and visual religious imagery are not now living channels through
which the sap can flow. They are somehow not the right shape to
contain their feelings. The vapid naturalism of magazines and
calendars comes to them with all the insidious authority of being
taken for granted by the majority of adults around them (to whose
status and standards they desperately aspire). Even if they reject
those and look to the contemporary artists, they find experiment,
vitality, turmoil, but no point of rest. There are no accepted and
acceptable forms in which to express those feelings which, they
would be relieved to find, link them with every generation. But if
there are no forms (and this age of excitement, expansion, illimi-
table possibilities could not have remained bound within the
forms of a more static age), there are those archetypal themes which
belong equally to all ages, and, rooted in man's remote past, can
yet emerge in contemporary images. While they can provide the
excitement of exploration, of discovery, they also provide a point
at which to rest: they bear within themselves such a wealth of ripe
tradition from the past that even to sink into them empty or
uninspired is to be borne up by rich and teeming associations.
They offer, as it were, a vertical path back into the core of oneself
rather than the horizontal extension of many school activities no
less, if no more, necessary.

1 Craft and Contemporary Culture, UNESCO & Geo. Hatrap. London, 1961.
R.L. H 89

SYMBOLS

Such an 'inward turning' can be reached by the writing of
poetry, the making of music and other activities, each of which
will appeal to some individuals. I would point out that in the
visual and plastic arts, two additional conditions are present. The
first is that often the actual movements involved in painting or
modelling some of these themes are, as in some dances, likely
to induce an inward-turning contemplative state. The second
is that the result is an actual object in the world and therefore
a record for oneself by which later to assess the experience.

It must be emphasised that the themes which we discovered to
have this potential were not subjects which demanded this con-
templative or symbolic treatment, which they so often received.
Those who wished to treat them as memory studies, or to con-
struct intellectually composed pictures on them were quite free
to do so and a few children always did. On the other hand the
treatments which I would be bold enough to call 'symbolic',
having a sense of significance greater than the overt image, varied
enormously even in one class, as the illustrations show. Some are
almost abstract and were, I am sure, intuitively reached through
a falling away of the concrete, localised associations. But to their
makers they did in some sense represent this thing in its essence.
Thus at the artist's level, do Ivon Kitchens' paintings through
successive versions arrive at an almost abstract relationship of
forms and colours which are yet the very essence of woods and
water. And just as an image, sometimes a figurative image, arises
out of the 'chaos' of letting the paint get on to the canvas by a
Jackson Pollock or an Alan Davie, so it may be at his own level r for
an adolescent.

It would be very unfortunate if I gave the impression that I
think the subject in any literal sense is the most important thing
in art. These pupils were not artists, and I hoped not to make them
artists but to give them something of the experience an artist has.
They cannot share his sense of mastery in the medium that takes
his years of training to acquire. They cannot share his knowledge
of the past and his sense of standing at the extreme boundary of
the present, revealing new things to his generation. But they can
share the utter absorption of the whole being in this act of paint-
ing, a gathering into one concentrated act the physical, emotional,
intellectual forces which, free of their normal outward pull, can
spiral down through the layers of one's own personality. And if

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SYMBOLS

they are encouraged to be completely involved they can stand at
their own boundaries discovering further things (which may
sometimes look banal to us, but which extend them) through this
fusion of inner-outer, higher-deeper in intense concentration.

If we agree that this experience is one we want for children and
adolescents, what are the conditions we can provide in which it is
likely to happen? This fusion of layers of experience only appears
to take place in certain circumstances.

Marion Milner whom I quoted earlier on the necessity of
forming symbols in the normal process of growth when she sets
out to study, in her own words, 'the emotional state of the person
experiencing this fusion', fastens on the word concentration and says:

I wish to bring it in here because ... I have often noticed, when in
contact with children playing, that there occurs now and then a
particular type of absorption in what they are doing, which gives the
impression that something of great importance is going on. Before
I became an analyst I used to wonder what a child, if he had sufficient
powers of expression, would say about these moods, how he would
describe them from inside. When I became an analyst I began to
guess that the children were in fact trying to tell me in their own
way, what it does feel like. And I thought J recognised the nature of
these communications the more easily because I had tried for myself
introspectively, to find ways of describing such states, mostly
particularly in connection with the kinds of concentration that
produce a good or a bad drawing. 1

She also says, 'Perhaps in ordinary life, it is the good teachers who
are most aware of these moments, from outside, 2 since it is their
job to provide the conditions under which they can occur, so to
stage-manage the situation that the imagination catches fire and
a whole subject or skill lights up with significance/ The metaphor
of catching fire is an apt one because the fusion will not take place
except at certain intensity of concentration. This in turn implies
a lack of nagging worries about getting dirty or being late for the
next lesson. The teacher's 'stage-managing* must include putting
minds at rest about such things.

It may also require in the painter or modeller sufficient skill not

1 M. Milner, 'The Role of Illusion in Ego-Formation*, New Directions in
Psycho-analysis, Tavistock Publications, 1955.

2 She goes on to say that in psycho-analysis, however, the process can be
studied from inside and outside at the same time.

9 1

SYMBOLS

to be hampered by concern about his materials this will vary
very much with the difficulty of the medium used. Margaret made
her garden on the first occasion she used clay, and many of the
other models shown were made at the first contact with clay. We
are less likely to meet adolescents though we do find untaught
adults who have not used powder paint, and I acknowledge that
the ease shown in many of the pictures may come from previous
work on more formal lines with the teacher. The inter-relation-
ship between acquiring techniques and 'self-expression' is worked
out in the Appendix on Phyllis' progress, but is too familiar to
many of my readers to repeat here. I shall only emphasise that I
see week-by-week planning as an alternation of the discipline of
mastering techniques with the opportunity to plunge into 'the
creative moment' when it arrives either fortuitously, because the
wind bloweth where it listeth, or because the teacher has one eye
on the stars and his trimmed the sails with foresight and wisdom.
On the other hand,, what was a living symbolic form can become
dead for an individual or a community, just as a ritual can. Then it
acts as a constricting grip on further growth and has to be broken
through. This has happened frequently in the history of art, as
when the figure of the Christ crucified remained a stiff enigmatic
cypher in early Italian painting while the figures around the cross,
or in associated scenes, were akeady taking on the physical flesh
and human characteristics which were to be more fully explored
in the Renaissance. 1

1 1 discovered, on a visit to study styles of Byzantine Painting in Mace-
donia, the wall paintings of the little church of Nerezi show in the twelfth
century a sudden flowering of human feeling in this formerly hieratic scene.
But the human pathos of the dead Christ's body, and the human sorrow of
Mary proved too shocking to be acceptable to a people long used to a more
remote hieratic and symbolic art, and this more human treatment of con-
secrated scenes was dropped and the ritualistic attitudes re-adopted. Over
the next century small minor changes paved the way for the acceptance of
a more fully human as well as divine interpretation of the Christ, which is not
found again till almost a century later at Milesevo.

In that fascinating book landscape into Art (Penguin), Sir Kenneth Clark
traces the development of what he calls 'the landscape of symbols' from the
'unconvincing equivalents of Eadwine's psalter' through the mosaic floral
backgrounds of the Capella Palatina mosaics, and the highly conventional
rocky mountains in the background of Duccio's Marys at the Tomb, towards
what he calls 'the landscape of fact', drawn from observation, involving
sensory images.

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SYMBOLS

In the same way the visual symbol in which a fundamental
theme is expressed may, for a child or adolescent, ossify into a too-
confining formula. This can be broken through by preparing for
an infusion of new life through shattering the fixed symbol-Image
by a shock of sense-perception., a sudden 'seeing afresh' in a new
light (perhaps literally floodlit, which can often be arranged by the
teacher). We are fed through sensation the messages of our
senses and a fresh sensory experience contributes to a new image.
Something like this happened to Hilda, who used the subject Our
House (in which they were encouraged to portray any aspect,
including the family at home) to produce again the stereotyped
doll's house kind of drawing which she had been repetitively
scribbling for a long time. This obsessive drawing of houses is
common in children, especially girls, who are insecure. It seems to
be for them a kind of reassuring talisman and I would not myself
express any dissatisfaction with it until I could spend a fair amount
of time with the child, trying to understand her situation. With
Hilda I encouraged her to discover new visual aspects of her own
home, to see it literally from a new angle, to describe odd corners
and aspects of it, to make things for it. I was trying to sustain the
feeling of belonging, while urging her to see it, even for brief
moments, objectively. Later, she was persuaded to venture into
the independence of seeing it and drawing it as one home among
many, in fact, her street, her township, which could become as
much her own as her house was.

I do not pretend that one can cure a neurotic child in this way,
(though it may be possible to work with a psychologist in con-
sultation) but at least we can try to work within the orbit of the
individual problem, when we become aware of it.

A second way of breaking out of a too-confining symbol-image,
is by penetrating reflection on the symbol's meaning. One of my
students doing her teaching practice in a grim Yorkshire mining
town on the edge of moorland country, chose EASTER (which was
approaching) and with one form carried that theme for several
weeks through all her work in literature, painting, religious
knowledge and dance-drama. She suggested that they should
imagine the story as taking place within their own grey, sooty
streets, with Christ as a pit-prop maker for the mines. By reading
and re-reading the story, by writing their own thoughts on how
it would appear in our time, and by acting the various emotions

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SYMBOLS

of the crowds, the soldiers, the disciples, she and her class trans-
posed the theme to their own environment. They envisaged, for
instance, the healing miracles as following a car accident, and
Christ retiring to the Huddersfield moors for the Transfiguration.
The whole atmosphere of serious study and solemn absorption
created over weeks by these rather rough, rowdy adolescents was
impressive. The pictures which emerged lined the corridors for
Easter week, and compared with the former stilted representations
of religious scenes they enshrined an experience which enriched
for us all the idea of death and resurrection.

Thus, an archetypal symbol will have both a dynamic and a
stabilising function, confirming one in the security of his traditions
but offering the possibility of renewal in finding fresh meanings
and experiences in familiar things. The teacher's awareness of
these possibilities will help her to choose themes which answer
different needs. It is not her job to search for or interpret obscure
symbols we are surrounded by sufficient in which we all share
but rather to recognise their power and the mode of their opera-
tion. We may take to heart Wilson Knight's words, *We must
always be more interested in the symbols themselves than in our
interpretation of them.' By practising an art even in a simple way,
or at least practising the appreciation of an art, and by being pre-
pared to give herself up to the aesthetic moment when it comes,
she can keep her own sensitivity alive.

POEM BY A SECONDARY MODERN GIRL SUGGESTING SOME
ASSOCIATIONS OF A CONTEMPORARY SYMBOL-IMAGE.

THE AEROPLANE

The creature of the air, to "which we owe so much,

a floating bird of profound beauty,

It soars above the tossing clouds

Where the sun shines, but to this

bird I have to say (in which we put our trust

In this age of war) I see thee and thy

brothers do beguile your maker
You fly o'er land and sea but nought will change thee.

94

CHAPTER SEVEN
CIRCE'S ISLAND

Gas and electricity have killed the magic of fire, but in the country
many women still know the joy of kindling live flames from inert
wood. With her fire going, woman becomes a sorceress; by a simple
movement, as in beating eggs, or through the magic of fire, she effects
the transformation of substances: matter becomes food. There is
enchantment in these alchemies, there is poetry in making preserves;
the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed
life in jars. Cooking is revelation and creation.

The Second Sex, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

After his victorious fight, Gilgamesh washed out his long locks and
cleaned his weapons; he flung back his hair from his shoulders; he
threw off his stained clothes and changed them for new. He put on royal
robes and made them fast. When Gilgamesh had put on the crown,
glorious Ishtar lifted her eyes, seeing the beauty of Gilgamesh. She said,
'Come to me, Gilgamesh, and be my bridegroom; grant me seed of
your body, let me be your bride and you shall be my husband. I will
harness for you a chariot of lapis lazuli and of gold, with wheels of gold
and horns of copper; and you shall have mighty demons of the storm
for draft-mules. When you enter our house in the fragrance of cedar-
wood, threshold and throne will kiss your feet . . .' Gilgamesh opened
his mouth and answered glorious Ishtar, *If I take you in marriage,
what gifts can I give in return? What ointment and clothing for your
body, what bread for your eating? How can I give food to a god and
drink to the Queen of Heaven? Moreover, if I take you in marriage, how
will it go with me? Your lovers have found you like a brazier which
smoulders in the cold, a backdoor which keeps out neither squall of
wind nor storm, a castle which crushes the garrison, pitch that blackens
the bearer . . .

'Which of your lovers did you ever love for ever? What shepherd of
yours has pleased you for all time? Listen to me while I tell the^tale of
your lovers. There was Tammuz, the lover of your youth, for him you
decreed wailing, year after year. You loved the many coloured roller,
but still you struck and broke his wing; now in the grove he sits and
cries, "kappi, kappi, my wing, wing". You have loved the lion tremen-
dous in strength: seven pits you dug for him, and seven. You have
loved the stallion magnificent in battle, and for him you decreed whip
and spur and a thong. You have loved the shepherd of the flock; he

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CIRCE'S ISLAND

made meal cakes fot you day after day, he killed kids for your sake. You
struck and turned him into a wolf; now his own herd boys chase him
away, his own hounds worry his flanks.

'And if you and I should be lovers, should not I be served in the same
fashion as all these others whom you once loved?'

And Ishtar heard this and she fell into a bitter rage, and she went up
into high heaven to her father. Ishtar opened her mouth and said,
*My Father make me the Bull of Heaven to destroy Gilgamesh. Fill
Gilgamesh, I say, with arrogance to his destruction; but if you refuse to
make me the Bull of Heaven I will break in the door of hell and smash
the bolts. I will let the doors of hell stand wide open and bring up the
dead to eat food with the living; and the host of the dead will outnumber

the living*.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

English Version by N. K. SANDERS

SOME time before this 1 had been asked to take a group of teachers,
men and women, for a day's course in Junior School crafts. They
were teachers of a small industrial Yorkshire town and its sur-
rounding district, and though I had never met them before I
guessed from visiting some of their schools that they would be
not a very easy group to introduce to new ideas. From knowing
the work which went on there I felt that the most valuable
thing I could do in one day was to introduce them to clay, but
the organisers of the course had provided a great quantity of
scrap and waste material (tins, boxes, card, etc.) in order that
I should suggest some of the things which are possible when
there is no bought material available. While I believe that none
of us need ever be completely halted because we do not have
supplies of the materials we want for craft and while we must learn
to use the bits and pieces of material that are thrown in the waste-
paper baskets, yet I do also believe in the value of an inspiring
material for the children. This is one of our greatest assets. So, I
tried to meet the situation half-way and compromised by having,
as well as the waste material provided, two colours of clay avail-
able, a dark rough day, almost black, and a smooth white. I
myself also brought some natural materials such as feathers,
acorns, cones and twigs which cost nothing at all, but which have
subtle, natural qualities of their own.

Some of those teachers had come from the surrounding district
and were very understandably regarding this as an opportunity
for meeting their friends, so that when I entered the room little

CIRCE'S ISLAND

groups were sitting about in corners chatting and there was a good
deal of noise and hilarity going on, which I found quite difficult
to subdue in order to introduce myself. Even when I called my
group together, to show them the materials which were provided
for them, the uncertainty of these teachers in finding themselves
for a day in the role of learners was so great that they sheltered
behind a certain amount of fooling and noise and jokes. They were
convulsed by the cardboard centres of toilet rolls among the scrap
material, till later someone found that jammed into one another
they served for the trunks of palm trees. Although these teachers
had come voluntarily to join this group they were obviously
apprehensive and some of them said to me in a downright way,
'You needn't think that you are going to get me to use day. I've
always set my face against it it's messy stuff/ Because they felt a
little foolish themselves, they had to make fun of me who was their
teacher for today. One of the men picked up my yellow straw
Italian hat which admittedly resembled a wastepaper basket (or
perhaps a dunce's cap!) and putting it on his head, sidled about
the room in a comic fashion to the accompaniment of roars of
laughter from everyone. This then, was the group with which I
was faced. Their insecurity in the face of a new material made
them try to put off beginning the session. I had to conquer my
own nervousness at the unsympathetic element in the group, but
at last, by going round giving them a lump of clay individually,
they were persuaded to settle. Nevertheless, even as we began,
their defensiveness still found an outlet in jeering at one another
jocularly across the room for 'playing at baby stuff like day'. One
or two of them said to me, 'Can't I just sit and watch the others
and take notes?' There were still a few mutterings and even a
certain amount of resentment at my insistence, but eventually they
did quieten down, and sitting on the table in front of them, I
gathered them in a group close round. I told them that I would
later give them all thtfatfs about where to buy and how to store
clay for which they were damouring, but that the first thing we
ought to do together was to get our hands into the stuff, and
make something.

Now, I had previously given great thought to approach clay
with this group of teachers and I sensed that it must be different
from any of my usual introductions to modelling. 1 With a less
1 Two such ate described in Chapter I and in New Era, May 1958.

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CIRCE'S ISLAND

vulnerable group I would have left the suggestions to come from
them but I could (as they could not) foresee the technical difficul-
ties and possible frustration with some of the subjects they might
suggest. Moreover, during the early stages, such a varied group is
often pulled apart by discussion rather than knit together, and in
one day I felt we would become a group more surely by working
together. So we must get down to that as quickly as possible. A
clear lead was needed. It was necessary, above all, to choose a
subject in which none of them would feel incapable or at a loss,
in which they could all accomplish something. Therefore the sub-
ject must appear extremely simple and yet hold out a challenge to
those few who had initiative or who had some experience of this
medium. At the same time, it was desirable to show them a method
that they could adapt for their own classes. Although I have many
reservations about group-work, I felt beforehand, from the little I
knew of these teachers, that this course might help them to get
over a dissatisfaction with thek own efforts by incorporating their
individual work in a greater whole. However, when I began to
think of subjects for group-work which they might use in their
own primary schools, subjects such as the circus, or Gulliver and
the Lilliputians, or fun-fairs or harbour scenes, almost everything
I thought of seemed too obviously junior, or too reminiscent of
school projects for this group of grown-ups. I had usually found
that some slightly phantastic subject, such as clowns, or scare-
crows, or fairground eccentrics, released the timid by obviating
the necessity for representing naturalistically. But how to avoid
any suggestion of condescension in such a subject, and to avoid
limiting the more ambitious to mere phantasy? After long thought,
just the evening before, I had an inspiration. I decided to use a
part of the Odyssey ', which could hardly be labelled babyish, which
had the cachet of classical associations and which offered incidents
of varying complexity. So I chose the Circe episode from Rieu's
Penguin translation.

I told them briefly about the dilemma of making a choice of
theme and of the suggestion I proposed. They still tended to
giggle and protest among themselves, but as I opened the book
and began to read quietness gradually fell. I had reminded them
of Homer's order of telling the story, and read from the arrival of
the Greeks and their search of the island, seasoned warriors,
boldly challenging the unknown.

CIRCE'S ISLAND

In due course they came upon Circe's house, which was built of dressed
stone and stood in the middle of a clearing in a forest dell. Prowling
about the place were mountain wolves and lions, actually the
drugged victims of Circe's magic, for they not only refrained from
attacking my men, but rose on their hind legs to caress them, with
much wagging of their long tails, like dogs fawning on their master,
as he comes from table, for the tasty bits they know he always brings.
But these were wolves and lions with great claws that were gambol-
ling in this way around my men. Terrified at the sight of the formid-
able beasts they shrank away and took refuge in the porch of the fair
goddess castle. From there they could hear Circe within, singing
in her beautiful voice as she went to and fro at her great and ever-
lasting loom, on which she was weaving one of those delicate,
graceful and dazzling fabrics that goddesses love to make. Polites,
one of ray captains and the man in my party whom I liked and
trusted most, now took the lead. 'Friends', he said, 'there is someone
in the castle working at a loom. The whole place echoes to that
lovely voice. It's either a goddess or a woman. Let us waste no more
time, but give her a shout/

Early in the reading the headmaster of the school in which we
were working strode into the room. I greeted him only briefly
and tried to concentrate on conveying the story, on letting the
magic of the words, even in translating, enchant us, binding us
together in the tenuous relationship we had begun to achieve.
The headmaster fidgeted in front for some minutes, lifted the lid
of a claybin, dropped it back, walked round, passing between me
reading and the group. However, when the door closed with a
clatter our restiveness under his scrutiny subsided; we were all
captivated again by the spell of the story. Before the end they were
listening in complete stillness. When we started quietly to discuss
how we should portray the scene most of them were serious -and
eager to begin. I suggested that each should choose one thing on
Circe's island to model (which gave them a wide choice), with a
reminder that, as well as the pigs and the swine who were
Odysseus' men, we were told that there were Hons, wolves and
many other sorts of animals, the victims of Circe's spell. In addi-
tion there would be birds on the island, and, of course, there
would be trees and Circe's castle. In building up this background
without spending too much time, the scrap material would be
useful They could begin by shaping one of the men or animals
in clay; then they might go on to do something in different

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CIRCE'S ISLAND

materials, a tree or a bird. Afterwards we would assemble them
all on the island, which was to be prepared on a large table at
the side.

With interest whetted they scattered to their places and after the
first excitement of hands in wet clay, and a few nervous and self-
conscious gibes between the men, most of them settled down
contentedly. Three men were left sitting together, who, armed
with clear, open notebooks c for taking notes', were drawing
strength from solidarity and refusing to risk making fools of
themselves with clay. They were cajoled into taking off their
jackets and persuaded towards the clay-bin just to lift the lumps
which were too heavy for me, and finally enticed into trying the
feel of the stuff itself, and very soon they were modelling like the
rest. There were in this group three nuns, sweet and very earnest,
who found it painfully difficult to make anything in the clay at all.
Genuinely anxious to learn anything which would be helpful for
their pupils and half persuaded intellectually as to its value, they
could not, in spite of voluminous overalls, let themselves enjoy
the material. As I walked round the class they gently called for
my attention, obviously distressed and unhappy about their pro-
ductions. Two of them had made identical squat terrier dogs of
the sort one so often sees as plaster mantelpiece ornaments. I am
usually glad when contact with clay persuades anyone to break
through the inhibitions which produce such stereotyped and
sterile productions, but if they had indeed 'let themselves go' with
the clay, they would have been left unsupported at the end of that
day to cope with a kind of experience for which I guessed their
ordered lives provided no channel. The first real contact with clay
can be shattering, and may need further experience with clay to
work through to the forming stage which follows the disruptive
one. I asked them if they would be happier working all three
together on Circe's castle to place on the topmost point of the
island, and they apologetically welcomed this suggestion. Twitter-
ing like gentle serious birds they delicately picked at the box of
scrap materials with white fingers. They did in fact turn out a
charming conventional construction of cardboard, something
between a castle and a bower with a great arch under which Circe
could appear.

Of the group of forty or so, most seemed happily absorbed in
their work and there was the sort of movement to and fro among

100

CIRCE'S ISLAND

the boxes of bits and the clay-bins., purposeful, yet quiet, that one
expects to find in a working group. Many of them had been able to
overcome a real reluctance at being novices in a strange material,
because with this subject they could work in a phantastic rather
than a realistic (and therefore 'measurable') way. Some, after beg-
ging repeatedly to be shown the 'right' way to model a man or a
lion, discovered with pleasure that they were able to model what
they wished there was no 'right' way and they gained rapidly
in confidence. The danger of this approach was that they might
consider art and craft all too easy and frivolous, but on the other
hand, such a relaxed attitude opens the channels for the real
nature of the material to be apprehended, giving a sound basis for
more demanding work. When I came back to the three difficult
men who sat together, one of them called me aside into a corner.
He pleaded that he really could not bring himself to use the stuff
and was most ill-at-ease. I believed that if I could have had a little
longer alone with him and the clay, or if I could have started him
working in the dark so that he was not self-conscious about
results, that he would have got over this miserable stage. But as it
was, he must not go on feeling frustrated and influencing the
others by his restlessness. It was essential to restore his confidence,
so I proposed that he might make the island on the large side
table (a simple but responsible job, and incidentally further away
from his jeering companions). He brightened up at this prospect
and started at once. Provided with large sheets of paper in brown
and blue he could cover the table as with the sea and roughly build
up the island to a central height by boxes under brown paper. He
worked there with a good spirit.

The day passed quickly after that. Perhaps an hour before the
end we stopped and, as each one finished, he came and placed his
contribution on the island, disposing them so that they formed
coherent groups from every side as one walked round the table.
The nuns beamed shyly on seeing their castle perched on the top-
most point, and in the next quarter of an hour the island sprouted
trees and bushes which quickly became weighed down with birds.
Underneath, the animals prowled very many swine, but also a
great variety of other animals in clay, some in wood scraps and
cones and the trees towered over all, waving their feather plumes
or long streamers of coloured paper. Those who had groped
tentatively in the earlier part of the day were now combining

101

CIRCE'S ISLAND

unusual materials from the scrap boxes with a cheerful abandon.
Even to me, it was exciting to see the empty table burgeon as an
island, unskilled it is true, a piecemeal but nevertheless a mean-
ingful whole. Discussing, encouraging, enticing this group to give
themselves up to their work, I had been far too busy to notice
whether we did in fact have a Circe. I had not wished to apportion
the subjects, and so I had made no special provision for her, but
when everything else had been settled in its place on the island
and the teachers were quite startled to see what they had achieved
on their first day, we looked round to see whether anyone had
modelled Circe. We had, it then appeared, two Circes and now
they were brought up. (These were the only figures; no one had
chosen to do Odysseus or his men.) One had been made by a
young, rather pretty girl, who had worked so quietly in a corner
I had hardly noticed her. Her Circe, in white clay, represented a
beautiful young woman with her wavy hair drawn back from her
face, a necklace above her very low-necked bodice, a nipped-in
waist with a long full skirt. She was very much the idealised
princess type and gave me a slight shock when she was presented
as Circe. Thea one of those men who had been most difficult
came up and produced diffidently from behind his back a Circe
made in the last few minutes from the black clay. She was a true
witch figure with a beaked nose almost meeting her bony chin, a
tall witch's hat and a cloak of black clay falling from her shoulders.
He had given her a twig to hold a wand or a broomstick? She
was a frightening figure, and when we put the two of them back
to back on the top-most point of the island under the archway
created by the nuns, two essential aspects of woman, the princess
and witch images, were there starkly in front of us. I was filled
with that awe which wells up from time to time in teaching. After
working closely with this group for the day, I would not avoid
sharing my feelings with them. Although I had chosen the subject,
as I thought, for purely practical reasons, and while what we had
been doing might have seemed like childish play, we had that day
touched depths which sounded the maturity of us all. They drew
up their chairs and stools around the island table, and we found
ourselves discussing how close was the 'white Circe' to the
princess phantasy of adolescent girls. Her modeller seemed to
accept the comments and joined in the discussion. We argued
whether that phantasy should not be more linked to reality by

102

CIRCE'S ISLAND

giving sympathetic attention to school-gills' interest in their own
appearance. We talked of how the teacher's sympathy and appre-
ciation can foster this; of the provision of a sustaining if critical
atmosphere in which to make experiments in their own make-up
and clothes before going out to jobs or college; of the effect
masculine appreciation as well as feminine understanding has on
the dawning realisation of womanhood and the advantages of
having mixed staffs for adolescents. The men, now quite talkative,
gave their jocular opinions of women's fashions (including my
hat) and it was taken in good part. Very soon we found ourselves
going on to discuss the darker side of men's idea of women, the
witch-like, the frightening, the transforming or devouring woman
a conception of woman which lurks somewhere in all men's
ideas and the significance of witch-hunts. Then we spoke of the
apparent necessity in all ages of mankind for this fear to be
embodied in a witch-like personage in the Gorgon, in Ishtar,
seductive and terrible in her rage, and in La Belle Dame san Merci
and of how the goddess of Love was also goddess of Death.
Then we discussed precisely what, in fact, Circe had done in spell-
binding Odysseus' men, and in what circumstances in our con-
temporary life men might be said to become swine. This led us on
to what Odysseus had done to Circe, and the pain suffered by both
men and gods, and the growth of the idea of gods who could
suffer, and of the Suffering God.

So, here in one of the least promising groups I ever had to lead,
I found we were talking on a level which would have seemed quite
impossible to that ill-at-ease and nervously childish group and
that diffident and slightly defensive tutor who had met that morn-
ing. 1 It dawned on me then, and I put it to them, that we had been
freed to meet one another by the power of a symbol, made
explicit in the double image of Circe they had produced, and that
the possibility of this happening is enormously enhanced when
one uses as material the great enduring stories of mankind, the
vehicles of our culture.

1 One of my friends who read this account scribbled his own caustic
masculine comment: 'You of course were Circe. The chap who played about
with your hat (and it is a funny hat) was saying that he might be a dunce
but you were a witch. You wove a spell and tamed the wild ones and got
them eating out of your hand, but they did not find their true nature till,
in the discussion at the end, distinct from but joined in company with
women, they were full men again.'

103

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE TEACHER'S TASK

Memory should not be called knowledge Now it appears to me that
almost any Man may like the Spider spin from his own inwards his own
airy Citadel the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins
her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting: man
should be content with as few points to tip with the fine "Webb of his
Soul and weave a tapestry empyrean full of Symbols for his spiritual
eye, of softness for Ms spiritual touch, of space for his wondering, of
distinctness for his Luxury.

It has been an old comparison for our urging on the Bee Hive
however it seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the
Bee, let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey-bee
like, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is
to be arrived at: but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive
and receptive.

Keats' Letter to Reynolds,
No. 62 in Hyde Rollins Edition

WHEN we see what surprising things these children,
adolescents, and adults have done with some of the
themes offered to them, and how they raise in our minds
echoes from literature or the art of other ages, it is worth pausing
to consider what in fact goes on in an art class.

When we look in on a class where the teacher is suggesting a
subject, 1 what do we see? She presents a c theme' or 'idea', either
an incident which the class are to portray, or an object or group of
objects or a human or animal model, which they will observe,
and either portray or use as a starting point for imaginative work.
There is then discussion, perhaps elaboration of the theme. The
children work while the teacher gives individual help and com-
ments. The finished work is 'shown' in some form and probably

1 1 am not concerned here with other kinds of lessons, excursions, History
of Painting, etc., which will also be part of the whole course.

104

THE TEACHER'S TASK

discussed by the teacher or the group. If we just look in casually
on a class this might appear to sum it up.

But what is really happening? The law insists that the children
attend school rather than pursuing their own concerns; the school
probably insists that the pupils attend this particular class whether
they want to or not. Even allowing for the freedom of "opting
out', as art teachers we use the positive power of suggestion to
entice youngsters away from their own concerns of the moment
to concentrate on our chosen 'subject'. We ask them to expose
themselves to a stimulus we provide, whether it is an object or an
idea, and moreover we ask for a total response, not merely an
objective statement or the perfect repetition of an exercise, but
for imaginative participation in a situation. Once this is admitted,
it becomes apparent that the 'subject* we choose must be worthy
of their absorption; we must have confidence that the situation
into which we plunge them is capable of bearing them up and
carrying them to a new synthesis, a new point of rest.

In such a synthesis, past experiences and future anticipations
may play their part as well as present sensation and perception. We
may aim to direct their attention to one of three aspects of time.

In terms of the past, we may ask them to remember something
seen, perhaps a strange creature at the 200, or a familiar domestic
scene at home, in which the recall and loving portrayal of simple
objects engraves them on their minds. Or we may suggest they
look back on the sight of the winter's first fall of snow, with its
delicious shock of the familiar world transfigured, that they enter
again such a moment and hold it steady in their minds while they
capture its quality in shape and colour. Barbara's Wood (Illus. 6a)
was inspired by such a memory but must have been modified to
its present form by other 'mysteries' at which it hints. So, we must
not ask pupils to portray something perjciicious, or too banal to
merit their absorption, (If an individual takes the opportunity of a
permissive atmosphere to express aggressive feelings or com-
pulsive thoughts, that is different.) Stanley Spencer spoke of the
necessity for the artist to see his subject in a way that would
enable him to love it. Yet, we may suggest a subject, superficially
unattractive but whose implications must be accepted such as a
bleached sheep's skull or an industrial landscape in the hope
that appreciation, if not love, will emerge from the attempt to
search its crannies and portray it.

R.L. i 105

THE TEACHER'S TASK

Or, we may direct their attention to the present moment, to
something we have brought, or to a scene from the window, ask-
ing that they give themselves up to immediate sensations of tex-
ture, form and colour, and to 'draw' this object. When we are
going to draw something we must open ourselves and go to meet
the object with a fresh perception with as few ^-conceptions as
possible. We must go out of ourselves into it, to get the feel of its
life and structure from the inside. 1 Then we take back that object
imaginatively into ourselves, as though we were tasting it, biting
it, turning it over inside ourselves to assimilate as many aspects of
it as possible but all the time it is still out there existing in its
own right and what emerges when we-!draw' is something that
is part of us and part of it; either more or less 'like' it or like' us,
according to our style. Once having come into such close contact
with an object we can never be quite the same person again nor
do we ever see // again as we see other objects. We have a special
and intimate relationship with it. This is so strong that even look-
ing at an artist's drawing can do this for us to some extent: we can
never visit the Berkshire Downs without seeing the patches of
trees as the dense triangular shapes that Nash saw, nor walk down
a Cookham street without the instinct to put out our hands to
touch with Stanley Spencer's tactile sense.

Or again we may suggest that our pupils anticipate imagina-
tively some experience which they wiE have to face later starting
a job, being in hospital, a wedding, all within the safe and stable
framework of the classroom. It is of course possible to experience
only a fragment in anticipation, but to explore one's own reactions
in this way is in some measure to prepare. The teacher's sanction
for phantasies and fears helps a little to relate them to reality, and
phantasy has a positive part to play in development. It is very
generally accepted that for the young child to express his phan-
tasies makes it possible to acknowledge them and bring them
into touch with reality. 2 But I think it has not been fully accepted
how necessary this is also for adolescents, whether discussion

1 We may remind ourselves that Keats wrote, the poet . . . becomes as it
were for the time being one of the objects that interest him, 'since he is
continually in and filling some other Body.' Letter No. 118 in Hyde Rollins
Edition, Harvard Press.

2 One of the important contributions in this field was Ruth Griffith's
Imagination in Early Childhood, Routledge, 1935.

1 06

THE TEACHER'S TASK

stems from it or not. Many of the models illustrated, and the
"mined mountain' described at the end of 'The Mine in the Class-
room' include this aspect. Apart from events in their lives which
they are eager to paint in school, all these experiences we offer in
the classroom invite the pupils to imaginative participation. If
they do respond deeply and with sufficient technique (partly
joined in more pedestrian moments) and with a knowledge of the
qualities of their material and of the vocabulary of their art, this
intensity of feeling (unhindered by too much concern for these)
can raise the whole to the melting point from which it can be
resolved into a new form. And as the object was never the same
aggin_after j^eJbad drawn it, so such an experience is transformed
because we have made it part of ourselves. So, art is a way of
coming to terms with experience. Here we are brought face to face
with the mystery of the self which is shaped in the act of shaping
material things, and created anew in the act of creating.

This is a large claim in the face of the untidy scuffle in the
art room, the messy daubs, the misshapen pots, the cliches of
adolescent poems, the gaucherie of the school performance of
Borneo andjulietl But we are so often looking for the wrong thing
reaching after tangible evidence of our own abilities in good
products to exhibit. We must have faith in our own experience
that art does re-create; and we can only have our faith renewed by
making recurring opportunities for our personal re-experience of
this.

When the stimulus we provide or some event outside school
does startle into this new awareness, how can we enable our pupils
to experience fully such heightened moments and to grow through
them? It is the relationship which has been built up over the
previous weeks or years that will count, a relationship not based
on the teacher's greater knowledge or the child's immaturity but
on the respect of one human being for another. We must create
the atmosphere in which the pupil can savour such moments, can
take them into himself and be taken by them into something out-
side himself. We must accept whatever emerges in sincerity, even
if it seems a crude cliche (a cliche to us) or a vulgar exaggeration
(to us). We have to accept the sexual as well as the spiritual aspira-
tions of adolescence. This is no passive acceptance of whatever
comes. We have to search, so far as we are able, for the next
experience, the further challenge which might be right for this boy

107

THE TEACHER'S TASK

ot girl. I make no apology for veering in this study from a con-
sideration of the effect of creating on the growing personality to
that of appreciating works of art. The products are not comparable
but the experiences interweave at many points and enrich one
another.

108

INTERLUDE

ON LABYRINTHS

HERE follows an account of an Investigation into laby-
rinths to which Margaret's original model, and the excite-
ment generated by the mine in the classroom, had enticed
me. This led me to make a journey to Crete as the earliest
spring of European culture, which proved to be a journey
even further.

Some readers may wish to omit this historical and
anthropological matter, and to go on to 'The Visit to a
Coal-mine' which echoed the labyrinth theme.

ON LABYRINTHS

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future.

Dry Sakages > r. s. ELIOT

IN an earlier interlude, I told how Margaret's model had led me tc
study the history of rosegardens. Sufficient of the recurring ele-
ments of the rosegarden theme, the walls, the narrow entrance,
the roses, the foundations and this central object (which began as a
mound and was elaborated with pear-like appendages near the
top) occurred in Margaret's 'rosegarden' to link it uncon-
sciously on her part of course with the historic garden image oi
which I have given some account. But it did differ in one impor-
tant particular. Most of the gardens, actual and ideal, had a four-
square or rectangular plan and, though the way-in might be
narrow, it was not often, as here, indirect. I peered again at the
photograph (the material proof that I was not imagining the whole
thing) and sketched the plan shape as I remembered it. It had a
vaguely anatomical shape, I thought, but why had she taken the
trouble to make two entrances at opposite ends? I looked up my
notes of her words, and remembered Margaret tracing the path
between the walls with her finger, saying 'You come in here but
you can't get into the garden. You have to come round that way

FIG. 2. Plan of Margaret's model
III

INTERLUDE

. . .* to the entrance at the opposite end. I was tantalised by the
feeling that I could not understand what was there in front of me.
I felt in a daze, in a maze in a maze, that was it! Suddenly I saw
that this shape was an incipient labyrinth, an extremely simple one,
it is true, but one with the essentials where the seeker is deliber-
ately made to trace an intricate path in order to get to the heart of
the matter. 1 1 saw that this was in fact what I myself had been
tracing at intervals over many years now, and I had not yet
reached the centre. Why should a little girl of twelve put a
labyrinth round a rosegarden? Obviously I must start to learn
something about labyrinths.

I could remember two references to the labyrinth from classical
authors, in the Iliad and the Aeneid. When Achilles finally decided
to stop sulking and join the fight for Troy, Hephaestus forged
armour for him at the behest of his mother, Thetis of the Long
Robe. On the shield of Achilles (the shield, a weapon of protection)
among other scenes, Homer 2 says 'the god depicted a dancing
floor like the one designed in the spacious town of Knossos for
Ariadne of the lovely locks. Youths and marriagable maidens were
dancing on it. ... They ran lightly round, circling as smoothly on
their accomplished feet as the wheel of a potter where he sits and
works it to see if it will spin/

In the Vlth book of the Aeneid (which, when I left school, I
slammed shut), Aeneas, when he sails from Troy, comes eventu-
ally to the Western land where the portal to the underworld is
located at Cumae in Southern Italy, and he stops to ponder
on the labyrinth traced on one of the portals of the SibyPs
temple.

Daedalus, for this is the story, when he was inflight from the tyranny
of Minos, adventured his life in the sky on swooping wings and
glided away towards the chill North by tracks unknown. In these
lands he found refuge and straightway consecrated his oarage of
wings to Phoebus Apollo, for whom he founded a gigantic temple.
On the temple gate he pictured . . . the Athenians obeying the
ghastly command to surrender seven of their stalwart sons as annual
reparation; and there was the urn from which the lots had been

1 When I showed the photograph to Rudolf Laban without comment, he
immediately recognised this and called it an 'embryo labyrinth*.

2 Translation by E. V. Rieu, Penguin Classics, 1950.

112

ON LABYRINTHS

drawn. The island on which Knossos stands rising high above the
sea, balanced the scene on the other leaf of the gate. . . . Here was
the Cretan building in all its elaboration, with the wandering track
which might not be unravelled. 1

This description of the labyrinth on the gates of the Under-
world is seen by some as a parallel to Aeneas's quest, by some
others as a symbol of entry to Hades.

These gates guarded the temple of the Sibyl to me a strange
and shadowy figure of infinite age and they led to the world of
the dead. Why should they depict a maze? I had read that Henry II
hid his Fair Rosamond in the maze at Woodstock: I knew the
hedge maze at Hampton Court and the simpler turf mazes in
which boys used to chase girls near English villages, but my only
experience of anything reminiscent of a real labyrinth was crawl-
ing with a candle through an ancient tomb chamber in Guernsey
to peer at scratched drawings as primitive as an infant's of that
Mother Goddess who was still worshipped there, I was told, when
the Romans came. I remembered too that I had walked to the
highest point of the island where a menhir with worn protuber-
ances of breasts had been set up after it was discovered under the
chancel of the little church there. (So, whoever she was, she was
powerful enough to be feared by the first Christians. They had to
build a church over her to keep her down.) That was the very year
the war ended, and my restricted holiday had gained interest by
following any hints of her I found about the island, till I began to
think I had her too much on my mind, for, walking to church on
Easter Sunday (day of rebirth and resurrection), I suddenly saw
her unmistakably before my eyes. The post of the local church
gate, which I had passed unnoticed many times, was a huge skb
of stone on which some trick of the Easter light now threw into
relief her necklace and a suggestion of features vague, but too
like her authentic sister-stone on the island top to be mistaken.
I thought for twenty-four hours that I had made a real discovery,
but when, on Monday morning, I joined the island's archaeo-
logical society in order to consult their records, I found that this
stone was known to English archaeologists but that protesta-
tions about hanging the church gate on an ancient monument had
been in vain. (So she was still feared. She had to be debased to a
1 Translation by Jackson Knight, Penguin Classics, 1959.
"3

INTERLUDE

gatepost to pet suade the villagers that her power was past.) When
I enquired about the stone, the farmer's wife with whom I lodged
told me that it was indeed Very very old' and that flowers were
often hung round it and offerings of pennies put in the hollow of
the head, but that c no one in the village would ever confess to
having done so! 3 (Cf. figs 4a and 5a.)

So a goddess had been worshipped here before the Romans
came with their masculine civilisation of Jove, before the
Christians with their God the Father and God the Son.

I had hardly thought previously how the notion of godhead had
risen in human minds, not why God should be assumed to be
masculine, I knew the marvellous animal paintings in the caves of
France and Spain and, picturing a brutish society concentrated on
hunting to survive at all, I had presumed that men would have had
no time for numinous speculations, and that religious ideas would
have arisen comparatively late in human history. I thought I
might best understand their ideas by what they shaped in clay, or
stone, materials which stride the barriers of language. So I began
to go to museums to look for representations of early gods and
goddesses.

The museums were still all disorganised by the war, and objects
not properly labelled, which slowed up my amateur investigation.
But I worked my way back through the Bronze age to Neolithic
figures, which ranged from the representational clay models of
squatting women to the cold abstract fiddle-figures from the
Cyclades. At first I thought it was far-fetched to label these
'women*. I decided to make drawings of all the intermediate
stages from different museums till I found that I had a complete
range from the most realistic to the most abstract. I think I was
almost as excited as the archaeologist who first discovered it, when
my drawings laid out in order convinced me that these fiddle
figures were indeed the traditional goddess. 1

I had expected by an analogy with the animal paintings that
figurines would be more photographically realistic the further
back one went to Paleolithic times, or else that they would be
formless lumps of clay or stone through which human forms
gradually emerged. But I was delighted and awed to find that,

1 Maringer's The Gods of Prehistoric Man and E. O. James' The Cult of the
Mother Goddess wee not at this time published, and a conventional art
training had introduced me only to cave paintings as Stone Age art.

114

V VI (front and side)

FIG, 3, Paleolithic goddesses, (i) from Villendorf, Austria; (n), (in), (iv) from

Mentone, Italian Riviera; (v) from Siberia; (vi) from Lespugue, France.

All a few inches high.

from very early times, these conceptions of divinity in the person
of a fertility goddess had embodied a sense of formal relations.
I got immense pleasure from making museum studies of these
little figures, thinking to penetrate the secret of the thought of
early men by an accumulation of evidence in paint and pencil. I
began to plan my holidays to take me near towns with museums
travel abroad was still difficult and once I chose Oxfordshire so
that I could visit the Ashmolean. Disregarding all its other
treasures I made for a glass case of primitive figures, and among all
the hundred odd, almost jostling each other, one caught my eye
as though it had rung a note that I of all the indifferent crowd
could hear/ Three inches high, of sandy clay, a heavy-breasted
little figure held a child, which was not more than a pinched blob
of clay, crooked in her arm. I did not know from what part of the
world she came, nor from what period. I did not know why her
nose was like a bird was this intentional or from the act of press-
ing it out between finger and thumb? I did not know why, wearing

nj

FIG. 4. Later forms of the goddess showing Neolithic abstractions from the
earlier forms; with emphasis orj eyes, necklace, breasts, underlining the pro-
tective aspect rather than fecundity, (a) stone menhir, Iberia; (), (c) bone
from Iberia; (d) clay jug handle from Mesopotamia; (e) clay from Eastern
Mediterranean; (/) bone from Bulgaria. Not to comparative scale.

116

ON LABYRINTHS

nothing else, she should wear a necklace. 1 But I found myself
infinitely moved by the extreme simplicity and tenderness ex-
pressed in her primitive form through this common material. All
the sounds of the gallery died away, I forgot my knapsack of
paints and my weary legs, I became all eyes, only eyes to follow
the modelled curves and hollows of her shape. I mentally fitted
my fingers into the fingerprints of her maker still as fresh as if
they had been made an hour ago instead of five thousand years.
I almost felt that those fingers were my fingers, and in so far as the
modeller was the mother she modelled, so was I.

The attendant, thinking I was literally deaf, tugged my sleeve
and thrust his watch importunately before my eyes. As I walked
out dazed, I realised that it was more important to me than any-
thing else at that moment to find out more about these early
figurines. I knew that there must be authorities, but I was so
ignorant I did not know which books to read. It was hard to know
whether these were dolls, or idols, or concubine-substitutes buried
in graves.

I haunted the museums still hoping that the secnet lay with the
objects themselves. I plucked up my courage and penetrated the
fastness of the inner and beyond-inner rooms of the British
Museum, and was passed from one puzzled underkeeper to
another till I finally reached an aged and parchment-thin pro-
fessor, to whom I naively blurted out my fascination with some
primitive Indus valley figurines I had just seen.

'Are you referring/ he sighed, in a voice as dry as the dust
which surrounded him, c to the dubiously authentic funerary proto-
types of the supposedly stylistically comparable tutelary figurines,
characterised by marked steotopagous regions, recorded as
occurring concurrently with the multi-lateral or trapezoid brat-
tices in the sub-ferruginous layers of the cylindrical seal deposit of
Mohanjo-Daro, indicating the derivitive iconography of their
eventual antecedents of the third millennium?' I could only mur-

1 This strange circumstance is widespread and I have not yet discovered the
answer. The Persian goddess Ishtar had to take off her necklace to meet
her lover on the river. Necklace might be transposed for girdle, but even
much later we find the unknotting of a virgin girdle openly referred to, so
why the transposition? Briffault (Mothers., vol. Ill, p. 272) refers to an
Indian people who believe that her soul resides in a woman's necklace and
she must not take it off. This question has remained strangely unexplored by
anthropologists.

INTERLUDE

mur an abashed apology and back out. I must speak the language
in order to be able to learn from such people. I spent precious
hours following the arguments of scholars in obscure journals,
whose language defeated me, without any clear idea of what they
were about. I read avidly, without guidance or discrimination,, and
still fascinated, got more involved and confused. It was, I
remember, in the rather abstruse scholarly volume presented to
Evans on his seventieth birthday that I first recognised the voices
that spoke with authority, and this led me to the obvious sources,
to The Palace of Minos, and later to Gertrude Levy. Here I found
the answers to so many of my questions: why the early figures
were nearly all women, why the Neolithic and Bronze age god-
desses held their heads high and often nursed a child while the
older Paleolithic figures were pregnant women with no features,
no personality.

I began to get a total picture of that Great Goddess who, as a
symbol of the miracle of fertility, seems to have been man's early

FIG. 5 . Abstractions from the form of the goddess, (a) stone relief on menhir,

Saint-Semin, France; (b) scratched stone, Czechoslovakia; (c) clay *bell figure'

from the Danube valley. Rosettes were used to designate either eyes or

breasts. Not to comparative scale.

ON LABYRINTHS

conception of a divinity. From somewhere on the steppes her
worship and her image must have spread to India, where her cow
incarnation is still sacred; to Mesopotamia where later we find her
as Ishtar the horned-moon goddess; to Egypt where she antici-
pates the Mater Dolorosa as Isis (nursing her son Horus, the
re-incarnation of him who died overcoming evil, and whose body
was found in a tree); and to Greece where, in the Demeter-
Persephone image she keeps her fertility character, as goddess of
earth, corn, the Underworld and the rebirth of spring. Gradually
evolving in the distinctive goddesses of the Greek Pantheon, she
mirrors the increasing complexity and rationalisation of religious
thought.

It was about this time that a little girl of eleven in my class took
off her eye-covering after a blind-fold modelling session and ran
to me with a clay shape apparently as evocative but as little
defined as Margaret's 'rosegarden*. 'Isn't it lovely,' she crooned,
stroking her model as she put it in my cupped hands, *I don't know
what it is, but isn't it lovely?' I might not have known a few
months earlier what it was, but irresistibly it provokes comparison
with one of the Stone age Mother-Goddess figures (Illus. 25 d).
This is the more striking as usually it is the experience rather than
the product which satisfies younger children. Her delight and
release were unaffected by not being able to say what she had
made.

The use of such strange forms as this and the labyrinth-round-
a-rosegarden intrigued me with their echo of some remembered
association. From my reading I now knew that Crete was the
highest civilisation centred on the Mother-Goddess cult, where
her image can be traced through a thousand years from the rough
Neolithic forms to the highly polished and sophisticated Snake
Goddess surely an ancestress of the Pythoness of Delphi
(Delphos means womb, here Vomb of the earth'). Crete was also
the traditional site of the labyrinth.

I resolved that I would go to Crete. 1 1 set myself to read and
study, for I was still deplorably ignorant of the general background
of archaeology. I seldom saw my friends. I 'scorned delights and

1 My studies of the variations of the goddess* form in museums of this
country brought me a small grant from the Educational Research Foundation
to enable me to make this journey. My gratitude strengthens the impulse to
write down this record.

INTERLUDE

lived laborious days', till the day I set off across Europe in my old
camping van. Ravenna, whose mosaics provoked reassessment oi
some children's work discussed later, the Black Madonna oi
Puglia, the sight of horseless Ithica, and the procession of ikons
on Good Friday, which was my first landfall on the Greek main-
land, all contributed to this study, but my objective lay further
back than Athene's city, beyond even the Lion Gate. (From close
parallels in Asia Minor it is argued that that gate at Mycene would
once have borne the Great Goddess' image standing on the Tree
of Life between the lions.) 1

One evening, when Hymettus was as romantically purple as the
underside of the grapes which used to grow on its now stoney
slopes, a friend and I went down to Piraeus and, like the peasants
around us, spread our blanket to lay claim to a few square feet of
deck, and cooked our supper to the notes of the three-stringed
lyre.

As the sun dropped towards the pillars of Hercules and our grey
Atlantic, I marvelled to see that Homer's sea is Vine-dark', and
opened the Odyssey again.

'Out in the dark blue sea there lies a land called Crete, a rich and
lovely land, washed by the waves on every side. . . /

I am no scholar, and if I indulge in a purple patch to respond
to such a moment, perhaps it is because I came only in middle age,
when life tends to narrow in, to this tremendous widening of
horizons which some glimpse of our Greek and pre-Greek
inheritance means. I had been reading Greek drama, studying the
evolution of the theatre, soaking myself in Minoan art, above all,
poring over the plans of Knossos so that, unconfused in space, I
might better be able to take that imaginative leap in time. That
evening sailing past Aegina, gazing towards Troezen (where
Theseus was begotten when Poseidon waded dripping to a hus-
bandless girl) I gave myself up to the magic of the moment, I
thought how Theseus must have felt, watching the whiteness of
the Acropolis fade into indigo Hymettus as it was fading that
night. On his triumphant return his old father Aegus would have
been watching up there for the white sail which Theseus had
promised to hoist, and, seeing it all black, had thrown himself

1 The aspect of the Goddess* relationship to animals is discussed in
chap. V of E. O. James, Cult of the Mother Goddess, Thames and Hudson,
London 1959.

120

ON LABYRINTHS

down from the citadel in despair. With what a taut power to move
us do these old epics speak across the centuries. They are as shaped
and perfected as the wine jars still redolent of ancient vintages,
while the cheaper pigskins expose their contents to the buffets of
time, and allow feeling to seep away till there is left only the dregs.

The next morning sailing along the coast of Crete I saw Mount
Dikte where tradition says great Zeus was born who was to sub-
stitute the Father-God for the Mother, and bring patrilinear
organisation, the light of logic and the thunderbolts of war to that
matriarchial, magic-ringed island, girdled by dolphin-haunted
seas and so to all us Europeans. I did not regret my nights of
study and days of hard travel, for Knossos holds so many mysteries
and repays even a superficial searching.

Scholars are still in doubt whether Knossos fell to an invading
army of Acheans, or in a bull-roaring earthquake, or lost her
impregnable sea girdle of naval-power. But how rightly is Crete's
overthrow fabled as the conquest of Ariadne by a young lover and
how poignantly she brought about the downfall of her own king-
dom by proffering the secret she was bound to guard, the dark
mysteries of the labyrinth. For Ariadne as princess was the
priestess of the cult of the Great Mother, and to bring fertility to
her island she must celebrate the Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Mar-
riage. Perhaps if Theseus did not come she must submit to her
brother as did the Egyptian queens but he was the Minotaur
that dark monster bull-engendered on her mother Pasiphae the

FIG. 6. (a) Steatite plaque, Egyptian. Deedes writes: 'the two figures can
only be the king-god and perhaps his royal consort united in a ritual scene.
It is possible that this scene is intended to represent the sacred marriage."
(#) Labyrinth on an Early Minoan seal from Hagia Triada, Crete, (r) Seal of
black steatite, with a loop for holding by, showing a spiral with four buds.

Middle Minoan,
R.L. K 121

INTERLUDE

Moon Goddess incarnate, when she put on the trappings of a
horned cow made for her by Daedalus.

Why do Cretan coins with the labyrinth design often show at
its centre not the Minotaur but a rose, a crescent moon (sign of a
virgin goddess), or the goddess herself? Perhaps the Minotaur
whether monster or bull-masked prince made his way to the
centre of the labyrinth to celebrate love and instead found death

FIG. 7. (a) and (&) Knossean coins, of the type which preserved the labyrinth
motif and legend into Greek times, one with a crescent moon at the centre,
the other with the rosette which had been in Egypt the emblem of royalty.
D cedes states that the latter has the minotaur on the reverse side, (c) and (d)
for comparison, sealings from Lerma (Greece), a Helladic site.

at the hands of Theseus? That would be true to the traditions of
the Great Mother as Goddess of .Death, figured in the Etruscan
urns, with her mark on the cave burial places across Europe since
Auringnacian times and her scratched image so near home as that
Guernsey dolmen.

In all the pre-history of the Near East, Egypt and the Mediter-
ranean lands there is found her pregnant image (holding a horn at
Laussel 'the horn through whose point, in later religious cults,
the creative force of the beast was thought to be expelled 5 ). 1 It
1 Gertrude Levy, Tbe Gate of Horn, p. 59.

122

ON LABYRINTHS

FIG. 8. (a) and (b) Knossean coins with a square labyrinth and the same form
converted into a round. The square is related to the Greek key pattern, which
retained a magical significance, while the round form was carried west by
Bronze Age settlers. (V) and (d] for comparison, Layard's diagrams repre-
senting the female Guardian Ghost who is herself the Path beyond the grave.
(c), and (d} sand tracing of labyrinth Journey of the Dead, Malekula.

is associated with caves, with winding paths, with cow-horns,
with a knot 1 (derived from the looped fastening of her cow-byre)
which is her symbol as Goddess of the Gate of the Sanctuary
which is conceived as her body ('He the Lamb and I the Fold*). 2
It is seen with a sacred, often milk-yielding Tree, and with the
moon (to whose rhythms woman today are subject as ever). 3

Of the Cretan labyrinth Gertrude Levy writes, 4 'Only Theseus
penetrated to the centre, to "discover" Ariadne, with the help of

1 Thomas Hyll, in 1563, in A. Moste Brief e & Phasaunt Treaty se Teachynge
How to Dress and Set a Garden, refers to Mas&s or Knots, and says,
*In the middle of it [the Maze] a proper Herber decked with Roses or else
some fake tree of rosemary/

2 The Gate of Horn, p. 100.

3 R. W. Cruttwell,in Virgil's Mind at Work, traces these double-images of
the Aeneid: Cybele (Great Mother of the Gods) and Venus, shield and maze,
urn and house, tomb and womb.

4 The Gate of Horn, p. 248. Faber and Faber, 1948.

123

INTERLUDE

her own clew, he* knot or key of life, and lost her again, as a
Goddess is always lost in return to the outer world, 1 But he set up
her image in Delos, and taught the sacred rescued boys and
maidens to dance before its horned altar the inward and outward
windings of the labyrinth singing the story as they moved.'
Whereas the chorus and actors in the ancient world were men,
ritual dancers were women, and this is the first record of men and
women dancing together. Here we see the true genesis of a rite
and this maze dance was performed by the inhabitants of Delos for
centuries. Evans records 2 a similar winding dance in Crete in 1930,
which was danced before a wedding.

These old stories are like Evans' partial reconstruction of the
Palace of Minos. You can walk up a solid gypsum-faced stair with
broad steps, then suddenly it ends your next step is in the air.
Sitting on such a topmost step of the Minoan Palace one moon-
light night the question teased me: why, since the labyrinth is con-
stantly associated with Crete by Homer, by Plutarch, by classical
historians and popular tradition (which surely only survives if it
fulfils a need), was no labyrinth to be found in Crete? Graves 3 tells
us that c an open space in front of the Palace was occupied by a
dance floor with a maze pattern used to guide performers of an
erotic spring dance'. No trace of it can be seen now, but the
labyrinth idea persists when its prototype has disappeared.

Among the many forms which have come down to us as
labyrinths, are the original Egyptian labyrinth mentioned by
Herodotus, the dance which was associated with the death and
rebirth of Osiris, 4 the dance of Theseus and his companions on
Delos, 5 the "troy-games' performed by lulus and his companions
at the funeral of old Anchises soon after Aeneas' landing in Italy,

1 Probably Ariadne, being a princess and priestess, could not leave her
homeland, or she would lose her lands which would wilt without het revita-
lising ritual.

2 Athur Evans, The 'Palace of Minos ^ vol. Ill, p. 76, Macmillan, 1930.

3 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths., 98.11, Penguin.

4 C. N. Deedes in The Labyrinth, ed. by S. R. Hooke.

5 Plutarch, 'Lives. c Theseus in his return from Crete, put in at Delos and
having sacrificed to Apollo, and dedicated a statue of Venus which he
received from Ariadne, he joined with the young men in a dance, which the
Delians are said to practise to this day. It consists in an imitation of the mazes
and outlets of the labyrinth, and with various involutions and evolutions,
is performed in regular time.*

124

ON LABYRINTHS

patterns on Etruscan urns, English grass mazes called 'troy-
towns', Bronze age carvings found incised on rocks from the
Aegean to Ireland, Roman floor mosaics preserved in several
European towns, 1 the mosaics set into the floors of mediaeval
churches 2 which were trodden on their knees by penitents as 'the
road to Jerusalem' (the one at Chartres has a rose at its centre!)
The Cretan Labyrinth with high walls is pictured in the Renais-
sance Picture Chronicle attributed to Baldini of Florence but
probably derived from much older sources. We cannot be sure of
the basic pattern of the dances except that they spiralled and
wound in and out, 3 though we may have a hint in the suggestion
that the Celtic interlacing ornament patterns are the plans of
dances. But at least the last five examples I have given and many
others share a clear and precise common plan, which is found on
certain Minoan coins and seals. It is centred on a cross and the
path consists of only one passage winding and doubling back and
forward till it wheels into the centre. The key to its drawing is

FIG. 9. Plan of the Cretan Labyrinth.

easily memorised as the cross with a quarter circle in its corners,
and it can be drawn by numbering these points and joining them
up in a certain order. It is so clear, so simple and so intelligently
worked out that one feels it is the product of man's intellect, work-
ing on an earlier accidental, confused and haphazard path which

1 E.g. Frankfurt.

2 E.g. Piacenza, St. Vitale, Ravenna, and Lucca, Pavia.

3 In the Palace of Minos. Vol. HI, p. 72, Evans illustrates a clay model
of a ring dance with a dove, from the late Minoan period.

125

INTERLUDE

the ideas usually associated with labyrinthine' lead one to expect.
It is as though the human mind insisted on a pattern, even from

IJ14

7-

10-
II-

/^ - 1415

FIG. 10. Key to plan.

r\

9
12
13

confusion itself! This labyrinth form, and the rituals associated
with it, were brought from the eastern Mediterranean (most
likely originally from Troy) to Britain by Bronze age voyagers,
and the shape in its pure form as here shown, incised into rock
faces, can be traced up the western coast of Spain, in France, in
Ireland, in Wales, 1 and in one recently found perfect example in a
river valley leading into Cornwall. 2 But it was carried even further,
for it is found in maze-figures laid in stones (sometimes white
pebbles, sometimes huge boulders) on the islands in the Baltic, in
Finland, Lapland and Iceland* 3 It is called e Jungfrudans* (Maiden's
Dance) or 'Ruins of Jerusalem', but most frequently some name
akin to Troy-town, e.g. Trogeborg on Wisby island. 4

As a craftsman I had always suspected that the patterns with
which ancient peoples covered their objects of common as well as
ritual use were probably much more than 'mere decoration', and
I had myself found that some hint of potency lasted on in peasants'
use of traditional patterns even when the meaning was lost. s
Here was an explanation far beyond mere conservatism, of the
persistence of a certain range of patterns of the spiral and Greek
key type. 6 Children often produced something like these in their

1 At Bryn Celli Dhu. 2 At Bosinney.

3 Since 2000 B.C. the Baltic area supplied Egypt and Crete with amber
by the Danube route. During this time Troy was the centre of distribution
to Egypt and Asia Minor.

4 Matthews, Ma%es and Labyrinths, London, 1922. Jackson Knight points
out that Troy is associated with a root meaning *to turn* or 'move actively',
and that we may suppose that 'Homer's Troy and all the other Troys were
called after the word used for mazes and labyrinths. Troy was called Troy
because it had some quality of a maze.'

5 1 gave an account of the peacock motif in Sicily in *The Sicilian Carretto*
in Craft and Contemporary Culture, Harrap and UNESCO, 1961.

6 The Spiral and Key patterns are discussed by Jane Harrison in Themis.

126

ON LABYRINTHS

work but that could be explained by their having seen such
patterns which are still used. The vitality which the peasants
sensed in them Is surely linked to the power they sometimes have
to excite and satisfy children. But Margaret's c rosegarden' was
provocative in its juxtaposition of garden and labyrinth. Most of
the associations I now had with labyrinths however, on burial
places, round urns, in dances commemorating deaths, in addition
to the original killing of the Minotaur himself, were associations
with death. This did not seem to fit in to the mood of Margaret at
all. What was the underlying meaning of the symbol of the laby-
rinth which resulted in its being used in these settings? And why
had an adolescent, lulus, led the ride at the funeral games of
Anchises which Virgil describes thus:

The riders now moved in gay procession past the whole seated
gathering in full view of their kindred. . . . They say that once upon
a time in mountainous Crete the labyrinth contained a path, twining
between walls which barred the view, with a treacherous uncertainty
in its thousand ways, so that its baffling plan , . . would foil the trail
of any guiding clues. By just such a course the sons of the Trojans
knotted their paths. . . . Much later Ascanius (lulus) inaugurated a
revival of the Trojan Ride and taught the Latins to celebrate it just
as he had celebrated it in his youth. . . . Rome in her grandeur
inherited it and preserved the ancestral rite. 1

Another curious tradition links Theseus with the labyrinth cult
at Troy. His son, Hippolytus, was priest there, and 'every maiden
before marriage, shears a lock of her hair for Hippolytus, takes the
shorn lock and dedicates it in the temple*. 2 The shorn lock was a
substitute for her virginity, for originally a maiden could not
marry in Babylon before she had surrendered herself to a passing
stranger within the precincts of the Temple of Ishtar. 3 In Troy

1 Jackson Knight's translation of the Aemid, Book V.

2 Jane Harrison, Themis. C.U.P., 1927.

3 Hartknd, The B//0 at the Tempk ofMylitta. Jessie Weston in From Ritual
to JLomance (chap. IV) refers to the curious practice during the festival of
Adonis of 'cutting off their hair in honour of the god; women who hesitated
to make this sacrifice must offer themselves to strangers, either in the temple
or in the market-place, the gold received as the price of their favours being
offered to the goddess. This obligation lasted only one day.' She points out
that Mannardt suggests that the women here represent the goddess, the
stranger the risen Adonis.

"7

INTERLUDE

this was the prerogative of the priest-king and C. N* Deedes sug-
gests, c lt is probable that the Athenian maidens sacrificed not their
Jives but their virginity to the Minotaur.' 1

But why were the mazes of England called 'troy-towns? Why
did the traditional games played in them involve capturing a
young girl, and why specially at Easter? 2

Hampered by rusty Latin and no Greek I got tangled in the
reading to which my visit to Crete had spurred me. This knot was
unravelled for me by c Cumaean Gates' 3 (those same gates to the
Sybil's temple in the Aeneid, which had been my earliest memory
of the labyrinth idea).

This fascinating study of the labyrinth theme relates maze myths
from many parts of the world. The author shows that even in
societies so widely separated geographically and in time as the
Homeric Greeks and the islanders of the New Hebrides today,
this myth can be linked by intermediate forms, especially by the
elements these two share with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.
There is a strong link between the journey-of-the-dead beliefs of
the islanders and VTthbookof the ^OT?/^ in that they share a belief
that the dead cross the sea westwards, that they enter the earth by
means of a cave and the tracing of a labyrinth is featured here
that water is crossed beyond the cave with the help of a pole or
bough from a certain tree, beyond which is open country where
the dead have peace; and that all this is known because someone
in search of an ancestor dared this journey and returned to tell it.

He also establishes the fact that a labyrinth has a double pur-
pose, to exclude,, to protect a sacred place (Margaret said, 'You
can't get in . . /) and to admit those who may come in on the
condition of having accomplished a devious route. In fact the
labyrinth is the symbol of conditional entry., used tactically in the
protection of towns and fortresses such as Maiden Castle in
Dorset, but also magically to protect in many senses from
those who did not know the secret. 4

1 In the volume The Labyrinth, ed, S. R. Hooke, S.P.C.K., 1935.

2 In A. Midsummer Night's Dream* Titania echoing the Sacred Marriage
theme laments

e the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For kck of tread, are indistinguishable*.

3 Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates 9 Blackwell, 1936.

4 The 'tangled threid* pattern with which Scottish women decorate their
doorsteps with white chalk seems a far echo of this, and Indian women do

128

ON LABYRINTHS

One of the examples the author gives is the Etruscan Traglia-
tella vase. It shows two horsemen apparently riding out from a
labyrinth which is pictured clearly and is of the exact Cretan
type (Figs. 6, 9) close to two pairs of figures in physical union
which may typify the Sacred Marriage. This is conjectural, but
there are Babylonian seals and an Egyptian, plaque which seem to
show the same scene surrounded by a labyrinth. The Sacred
Marriage which protects life by ensuring fertility must itself be
protected from evil influences, and its benefits must be protected
for those who share the Mystery in fact entry is here conditional
in every aspect.

So the tracing of a labyrinth is the weaving of a protective spell:
Achilles rode three times round the body of his friend Patroclus
in a rite of protection, just as he dragged Hector's body three times
round Troy unwinding its protective spell, (exorcising it, presum-
ably widdershins, or anti-clockwise). We find it in the winding of
witches spells, e.g. in Macbeth., and also in Coleridge's

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.

Some scholars associate the labyrinth with snakes and the
Mother-Goddess as Snake Goddess is, of course, the deity of
Knossos and others derive the mazy dance from the fact that
Egyptian kinds were disembowelled for mummifying, and the
ministrants, carrying away the entrails in canopic jars, were said to
perform a winding entrail dance. 1 But if different threads wind in
and out it is not surprising, for we are dealing with a very old
mystery. The parallel beliefs from modern inhabitants of the New
Hebrides associate the labyrinth with two phases of life, death
(where their labyrinth has to be completed by the ghost if rebirth
is to follow), and initiation at puberty. 2

Jackson Knight's theories would certainly explain many things
sharing the labyrinth motif which have been difficult to relate

pattern their door-ways with a maze pattern which their husbands must
tread before entering.

1 Babylonian tablets connected with entrail divination show patterns in
the form of a spiral form maze. Illustrated in Cumaean Gates, p. 116.

2 John Layard, Stone Men of Malekula, Chatto and Windus, 1942.

129

INTERLUDE

before: Egyptian tombs, Etruscan burial urns, and cave tombs, all
sharing the hope of rebirth; the winding ride of the boys at
Anchises' funeral games; the penance paths in the floors of
churches to be traced on the knees as a condition of absolution
which is a kind of rebirth; the Labyrinthine dance on Delos with
which Theseus and his companions celebrated their escape from
almost certain death and which was therefore almost a rebirth.
Rites of passage or threhold rites are commonly practised at
points of life's transitions, birth, initiation, marriage, death. ^

But the author makes clear that the essence of the labyrinth
motif is initiation; it is a rite performed, built, carved, painted or
danced to mark and magically to protect the transition from one
state to another. The word initiation comes from 'inire' to enter,
in the sense of 'to enter the earth', originally literally a cave, or one
of those holy lustral pits still to be seen at Knossos, where one
entered the body of mother-earth herself, to be purified and
renew protection by contact with her.

By primitive and highly civilised peoples alike initiation has
been regarded as a rebirth.

In the initiation rites of Attis the future worshipper must 'die
and be reborn'. First, through fasting he removes the impurity
from his body; second, he eats and drinks from the Sacra; third,
he goes down into the pit and the blood of a sacrificed bull is
poured over him; fourth, he comes out of the pit bloody from
head to foot; fifth, during several days he is fed only on milk like
a new-born child. 1 In the celebration of the initiates 'The first and
most important point was a Mystic Meal, at which the food par-
taken of was served in the sacred vessels, the tympanum and the
cymbals. . . . The food thus partaken of was a Food of Life 'the
devotees of Attis believed, in fact, that they were eating a magic
food of life from the sacred vessels of their cult/ 2

The initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries included a voyage
through a hall divided into dark compartments (a formal repre-

1 Originally these rites must have had a direct physical meaning; the
neophyte emerged covered with blood as a child from his mother's body.
Initiation as a kind of death and rebirth is widespread and is well documented
among the Australian tribes, and there are other accounts of initiates putting
over themselves the mother's skirt, or being covered with red ochre, being
bathed and other echoes of birth in rebirth.

2 Jessie Weston, From BJtual to Romance. Doubleday Anchor Books, New
York, 1957. Chap. X, p. 146.

130

ON1LABYRINTHS

sentation of earlier cave mysteries?); the climbing of a staircase and
arrival in bright regions; 'The displaying of the Sacra and the
representation of Kore's (the Spring maiden's) rising.* 1

Art and ritual were in their beginnings indistinguishable 2 and
Sir Herbert Read 3 has reminded us that art is a c dromenon' a
thing done (from which we get 'drama').

We do not know at what point in the history of mankind the
ceremonies of which I have spoken the shouting and stamping
which must have begun as a direct attempt at identification with
nature, the propitiation of the Great Mother-Goddess by the
blood of bulls, the defloration of girls by a stranger, the earnest of
fertility in the Holy Marriage rose to be what we should call
song and dance, to involve drama and sculpture. We do not know
when they rose above the desire for mere physical survival and
involved some notion of spiritual content. We get some hints of
that development of human thought, in the change from bull-
sacrifice to bull-dances; in an actual killing being superseded by
the reaping with a sacred axe of a sheaf of corn the symbolic
'except an ear of corn fall into the ground and die'. The Sacred
Marriage came to be a vicarious consummation and Gertrude
Levy writes that the words of Asterius, who took part in the
Mysteries, makes very clear one mystery was performed on behalf
of all. Is there not a descent into the darkness and the Holy
Congress of Hierophant and Priestess, of him alone and her alone,
and does not the great and vast multitude believe that what is
done in darkness is for their salvation?' Yet as each candidate for
initiation emerged at the end of his initiation, he was greeted with
the words 'Hail bridegroom, hail new light. . . .' (Here as else-
where the rite was performed in a cave or crypt.) This is as far
from the collective consummation of the old fertility orgy as is
the cutting of the corn from actual bloodshed.

By the time Apuleius wrote The Golden Ass the Mysteries were
certainly interpreted as a spiritual experience; participation offered
a more intimate knowledge of, and finally a union with, the Divine.
Later still, the beautiful frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries at
Pompeii though we know little about the actual observances

1 Jung and Kerenyl, Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Kentledge and
Kegan Paul, 1951.

2 This is the whole argument of Jane Harrison's Themis.

3 H. Read, Icon andldea> Faber, 1955.

131

INTERLUDE

speak in clear accents of a high order of experience. Participation
(as Jessie Weston says, "Dionysiac participation') was obviously
essential to the rite. 'The power of the sympathetic imagination
has at last replaced the sympathetic magic in which it has always
been present. 9

Since the persistent human hope of physical rebirth in some
form, which is embodied in burial rites, lends its symbols to other
ceremonies of initiation into sex experience, into marriage, or
into the social unity of the tribe or community- these too must be
conceived as a kind of rebirth, and this emerges clearly in many
forms of initiation.

Jessie Weston 1 says that the Grail story should be viewed
primarily as an Initiation story, and Cruttwell, speaking of the
root ideas of the Grail Legend, writes that in all its versions 'there
is a Questor or Hero . . . alternately urged and warned against
the Quest, who seeks now a Lost Mother, now a Dead Father,
now a Hidden Brother. I equate the obstacle with the Maze or
Labyrinth, both without and within the castle; the Questor with
the candidate for Initiation whose object is both personal and
cosmic ... the Questor's Mother with the Earth Mother/ The
Grail story reached most of us in such a sentimental and etiolated
form that it is difficult to convince ourselves of its profound
relationship to the old Nature and Fertility Cults till we remember
the haunting quality of its images, the Wounded King, the Dark
Wood, the Chapel Perilous, which still recur in so much poetry
today. 2

1 Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance, Doubleday Anchor Books, New
York, 1957. She says, the Symbols of the Grail legends bear marks of their
fertility origins such as the lance borne by a youth and the cup by a maiden
and are of immemorial antiquity, but it comes down to us in the form of a
divinely inspired quest, and initiation into a state of spiritual perfection
which is not to be achieved here on earth. Even the quest itself, its baffle-
ment, its wrong turnings and elusive interpretations, bear some marks of the
labyrinth symbol.

2 A. A. Barb writing in the Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. XVI,
p. 234 et seq. 9 points out that the word GRAIL can be related to GRADALE,
GRAZAL, GRAAL. A gradale was a paten for carrying different meats and the
Holy Grail is a sanctified gradale, Barb says. It was divided into foliated
sections a rose-window is essentially the gradale shape which were
scooped into hollows. It is in fact, the shape of the altar table in certain
French churches, a shape that only appeared in Europe (though known in
Syria) between 900 and 1300 after pilgrims to the Holy Land had been shown

132

ON LABYRINTHS

So, initiation involves testing and the hope of new life, of
rebirth. This thought is surely one for educators to dwell on. We
may have lost our rites of initiation, but we know that adolescence
is a kind of rebirth in sexual and emotional sense, and should be
marked by initiation into adult society. Emotionally it offers a
second and perhaps last chance. Now, rituals of initiation,
whatever else they may do, do offer an opportunity for pausing to
dwell on the significance of this crucial change of status, which is
not given in our pressure-ridden schools. Sometimes, as I have
suggested, adolescents will use the form of age-old mysteries as a
focus for contemplative thought, or for the explosion of an
emotion which is not finding a steady outlet. Just as peasants sense
the vitality of certain motifs whose meaning is lost to them, so
adolescents may gain an extraordinary satisfaction in using arche-
typal themes which they do not recognise consciously.

If I emphasise 'adolescents' here, it is because I concentrated
this study chiefly on that phase, and because certain human con-
ditions are thrown into relief at this period by its very extremism.
But it is true of all of us to some extent. We respond to forms
which symbolise our conceptions about life. Colin Still 1 has shown
that from the Eleusinian Mysteries (and likely long before) to The
Tempest, with its 'forthrights and meanders' through which
Alonzo's party find their allegorical destination, the labyrinth has
been an essential of what he calls the Universal Myth (the recur-
ring myth expressing the conditions of the soul's journey to
perfection) implying the doubt and confusions through which
men pass on their way to revelations of religious truth.

So, looking back on the things I had discovered about the
labyrinth dance on Delos, the depiction of a crescent moon or a
rose at the heart of a maze, the neglected turf mazes of our country
which are still used for kissing games in Scandinavia, and ponder-
ing on the tortuous social rituals of courting (whether of the
formality of our parents' days or modern American teenage
dating) as a social device for the protection of girls and as a form

such a table as the original of the Last Supper. At Besan^on until the
eighteenth century a table of this type was filled with sixteen pints of red
wine, solemnly blessed, and after every canon of the college had drunk a
few drops, the rest was distributed to the faithful. So the Holy Grail may be
the table of the last supper, as a symbol of the sacrament.
1 Colin Still, Shakespeare's Mystery Play.

133

INTERLUDE

of conditional entry to secret places, I was not surprised to find
that Margaret had put a labyrinth round her c rosegarden'.

I am not for a moment suggesting that she knew any of the
fascinating history of the subject to which the works of the
scholars led me. But this was the form which arose in her mind.
She sacrificed an opportunity to do many other things considered
more appropriate and, one might have expected, more attractive
to a young adolescent, to concentrate on her rosegarden-
labyrinth image.

I do not want to overload the incident with significance. This is
not the story of her education but of mine, of a quest undertaken
in mild curiosity which imperceptibly became a driving passion.
If I am a better teacher it is not only because I have read Virgil
again, with pleasure this time, have studied Persian miniatures
more carefully, or have got some glimpse of the way in which
human knowledge is built up by correlations from many different
sources. It is because I am more aware of the overtones which may
lie behind the simplest phrase or remark, the depth of satisfaction
which may come from a queer and unintelligible piece of work,
and so I think I am more responsive to the creative work of those
I teach.

A POEM BY A PRIMARY SCHOOL GIRL OF TEN ON THE
HADES-PERSEPHONE STORY

PERSEPHONE

As Persephone played with the nymphs

She saw a flower so lovely and rare

And went to pick it and in the earth there was a crack

And from the earth came Hades King of dead, who

Snatched Persephone and took her to his Kingdom

To become his Queen

And she would not eat or drink

And she would not speak to him.

On earth Persephone's mother, Demeter
Made winter on earth for a year
For she had not found Persephone
And let winter creep over the earth.

ON LABYRINTHS

WRITTEN WHEN PONDERING ON THE FORM OF THE
CRETAN LABYRINTH

We trod the pilgrim's road of dread, daze, loss,

A labyrinth where bulls breathe and serpents wind, we

Grappled with Ancient Eves only to find

The maze a mandala, the crux a cross.

S.M.R. 1959

135

PART THREE

FIRST comes an account of an excursion with my students
to visit a coal-mine and illustrations of some of the work
which arose out of this. There folio w some puzzling
pictures on the Themes and an attempt to explain the mood
which may have evoked them through the parallel with
frontality in mid-Byzantine art, with which they show
some surprising parallels. A possible connection with ritual
is explored.

There follows some account of an enquiry into the part
which the material plays in the eventual image, which had
been going on at the same time as the investigation into the
source of ideas.

Finally, the two themes, rosegarden and labyrinth, which
have been obstinately recurring in this study, are recon-
sidered as symbols of adolescence and as provocative
themes for us as teachers.

CHAPTER NINE
THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

Macrobius, commenting on the Dfeam of Scipio, says philosophers
make use of fabulous narratives, for philosophers 'realise that an open
and naked exhibition of herself is distasteful to Nature, who, just as
she has withheld an understanding of herself from the vulgar senses of
men by veiling herself with variegated covering, had also wished to
have her secrets handled by the wise through fables. Thus her rites are
veiled in mysterious labyrinths so that she may not show herself stripped
of such covering even to initiates.' The story which follows is no fable
but, like the rest of this book, as honest an account as I am able to give
of the events. Yet, as in the philosophers* fabulous narratives, there are
many veils obscuring understanding.

THE training college in which I worked lay in a pleasant
stretch of countryside just on the edge of the Yorkshire
coal-field. After we had been there some years the thought
occurred to me that, although so much of the life of children we
met in the schools and so much of the economy of the whole area
depended on coal-mines, I had never been down a mine. We often
had the strange experience, while rambling by bus through the
Yorkshire landscape of walled fields, and stone farmsteads under
trees, of having the bus stop to pick up half a dozen miners with
their blackened faces and their helmets still on their heads. They
had emerged from under the fields, from tunnels just somewhere
near by in this green countryside, and yet they seemed like beings
from another world. So, in a lighthearted spirit of curiosity, my
own tutorial group and I decided to visit a coal-mine.

The mine chosen was a small, old pit quite near our college
whose upper works of turning wheels and wires criss-crossing
against the sky had been a familiar element of our landscape. Its
spindly tracery had inspired many pen drawings. The refuse pit
of this tip reared itself up in a shapely symmetrical cone and
through the spring it was cindery-red, streaked with grey ash; in

139

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

summer a covering of green and sharp-pink rosebay-willow-herb
crept up the gullies and the crevices towards the dark top. After
a fall of snow the pure white cone raised itself into the frosty sky
like Fujiyama. But at night the liquid tarry waste from the mine
factory poured out on the other side of the tip into a horrible
black, molten lake.

This then was the mine that we were to visit. We set off by bus
at two o'clock on a summer afternoon when the lawns of the
college were mottled with daisies and buttercups and the lilac
scent weighted the air; the eighteenth-century balustrades of the
terrace garden were lapped in a heat haze. With the twenty odd
students I made the journey of half an hour to the mine; we were
laughing and chatting, free from the college for the afternoon and
with the natural exuberance of an excursion. Neighbouring a field
of cows and buttercups, with that propinquity typical of the West
Riding which delights and shocks at the same time, reared up the
mine-tip.

When we arrived at the shabby buildings, an angular island in
this undulating landscape, we were met by the under-manager
and, although we had all put on old clothes, we were persuaded
to get into dingy waterproofs or overalls too large for most of us.
Then we filed through a narrow passage to a further shed and
were handed metal helmets. As we tried them on we laughed at
the funny appearance of familiar faces in such an uncouth garb.
Then we went to the lamp-house and each of us was fitted up with
our lamp stuck in the front of our helmets and with the battery
swinging on a harness, rather grotesque but still amusing. We
moved across a junk yard with odd pieces of rusting machinery
and filed out of the sunlight into a high enclosed tower. Inside
the buildings of the pithead everything was dim; every surface,
grey stone, brown wood and navy serge trousers of our guide, was
uniformly dingy with coal dust. As we climbed a stone staircase
round the inner wall, we passed a square of glassless window and
I saw the shape divided precisely in two, the lower half of green
grass and the upper of blue sky. The fuU contrast of light tones
and bright colour emphasised the coal-encrusted walls closing in
on us. Having heard so much about the modernisation of the
mines, we were a little surprised to find how ramshackle every-
thing looked, but this was a small old mine or we should not
have been allowed such freedom. We stood crowded high on a

140

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

wooden platform with a frail banister round it, waiting for the
cage. When that clattered up to the surface, it was a surprise to
find that we had to bend down and creep into this rickety-looking
contraption, to crouch bent on the piece of rough wood placed as
a seat along the side. There was barely room to perch on one
another's knees or kneel on the floor. There were no walls to the
cage, only two iron bars bolted diagonally together. It looked like
an awkward meccano construction. Suddenly we started to de-
scend and it was as though we dropped plumb down like a
stone in a well. We were not told till later the astonishing rate at
which we had descended, but it was during those few moments
that, for the first time, anxiety chilled us. The breath was sucked
from one's lungs and left far above in the rushing descent. After
the first long gasp some of the students started joking shrilly above
the whine. In those few moments when we were crushed up
against one another, choking and clutching the nearest leg or
shoulder, I looked into the white face of the student next to me
and saw there the same alarm that must have been in my own. I
could not imagine how our frightful pace could slacken in time
for us to come to a halt when, as suddenly as it had started, the
cage had stopped with a clatter on the floor of the mine. There
we crawled out and stretched ourselves, waiting for the rest to
arrive by the next cage. We found ourselves in a huge tunnel like
an arched station lit by electric light. I had expected the mine to
be small, a series of narrow passages, and I was surprised and
relieved, if even a shade disappointed, at this great cavern in
which we stood, with tunnels running out of it in three directions
and a little railway line down the middle. When we were all
assembled we were told by our taciturn guide to fasten our helmets
more firmly, to check our lights, and to climb into the railway car
drawn up near by. These little cars were as exposed and ram-
shackle as everything else, the merest skeleton of rolling wheels
and platform, with two planks for seats facing one another: no
back support, no other protection. We piled into the car and sat
close up, clutching our helmets on because the electric wires ran,
it seemed, only a few inches overhead. Before we were settled the
cars set off and we realised by the cold air rushing past our ears
that we were gradually gathering speed. The large arched tunnel
narrowed down until the walls drew in close to the sides of the
car. We all hung onto our seats unless our hands were too occupied

141

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

clutching our helmets. We had been told that we were on no
account to try to get these back if they blew off, and this is
exactly what happened to Diana. Diana was a clever, highly strung
girl with delicate bones and quick bright eyes. I was sitting some
cars behind, facing forward, when her helmet was lifted by the
airstream. Instinctively, she rose to reach after it. I screamed to
her not to move and she restrained herself, but her pale yellow
hair was swept up by the wind of our speed in a halo. Just over
her head were the electric wires and I sat in terror, fearing every
minute that it would get caught in them, but I dared not call to
her again for fear she would rise in order to hear me better. So
through the dark tunnel we whistled. It was a strange sensation,
realising that with every moment we were rushed further away
from the one exit to the world above. Yet we had embarked on
this adventure voluntarily. I took myself firmly in hand and deter-
mined to enjoy it. I reminded myself that this was what the miners
did every day and, despite the very occasional pit accident, the
normal routine was the perfectly straightforward one of going to
work along this whizzing tunnel and returning at night back to
the shaft and up to the open air.

When at last the little cars slowed down and finally came to a
halt I breathed with relief that everyone was behaving sensibly.
We were now many miles from our starting point and were
surprised at the name of the village which lay about half a mile
overhead. In that close, dark tunnel miles from the shaft it was
hard to realise that cows were grazing and people going out to
tea, separated by yards and yards of rock from where we stood in
an electrically lit cavern.

At this point we turned off into a corridor just head-height but
dripping with damp from above. Now there was no more light
but that from the lamps on our helmets, the batteries slung on our
backs. We pushed our way round a dust curtain, a piece of water-
proof sheeting hanging like a door across the corridor, and started
up a long slope. As we climbed the atmosphere got hotter and
damper, we saw the moisture condensed on the walls of the shaft
and we had to negotiate many puddles underfoot. Now the
students felt they were meeting the real thing and they were full
of fun, amused at their own situation and tickled at each others'
appearance, for we were fast collecting smudges on our pale pink
faces and felt grateful for the overalls which had been put over

142

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

our clothes. Our unsparing guide walked rapidly and it took us all
our time to keep up with him on that upgrade. From time to
time we had to negotiate a blast door, a little wooden door set
high in the middle of a solid barrier across the corridor; this meant
clambering up one side and down the other and we would have
been left behind if we had not hustled one another through. It got
damper and stickier underfoot until we were sometimes wading
through a few inches of mud. On the whole the girls had come
very sensibly dressed, but Anita, red-haired, sophisticated, had on
high-heeled shoes. In the mud pools she lost one of her shoes and
before she could rescue it the man behind had stepped on it and
broken it. From then on she hobbled along in one high heel and
one bare foot, in spite of oux protests that it would be better to
have no shoes than to have one. Gradually this corridor became
lower until we had to stoop, heads thrust forward between our
shoulders, constantly knocking our foreheads and our elbows on
projections of rock. So far, although the stone was black and
grimy, we had seen no coal no coal in the seam, that is, for plenty
of dross and coal dust was scattered underfoot. Entirely dependent
on those little lights on our foreheads, we stumbled against the
sides of the tunnel and cut our fingers and stubbed our toes. We
began to get some inkling of the miner's great dependence upon
his lamp. Few of us did not begin to imagine what it would be
like to be alone in this place without a light, and to feel the com-
fort of that small beam that stood between us and an unimaginable
darkness. The upward trek continued in a kind of crouched lope:
we scorned to fall behind or beg for a rest.

During the last half-hour we had been feeling a bit uncomfort-
able but still the brighter sparks were throwing out the occasional
joke. Geoff, always a wit, had expressed great pleasure at the first
large cathedral-like tunnel and asked loudly why he was preparing
to be a teacher when he could get -10 a week down the pit? 1 Now
GeofPs face was red and running with sweat, and over his shoulder
he said to me, 'It's getting a bit warm, isn't it, but I don't think it's
as warm as Lower IV classroom. I'll still plump for that jCio a
week!' So on we went. After about three-quarters of an hour of
this steady, hunched climb with necks craned, we arrived filthy,
sweating and a little bruised at the last barrier, the entrance to the
coal-face itself. This time the narrow door in the blast barrier was
1 This was in 1956.

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

very high and we had to hoist one another up and push bottoms
to get each one through. Those on the other side grabbed which-
ever part appeared and tugged hard.

Turning a sharp right angle beyond the last blast door, we
found ourselves bent double at the coal-face. In a low tunnel the
shining seam of coal less than a foot high stretched horizontally
and slightly irregularly beside us. It started from about nine inches
above the tunnel floor and from the top of it a rough hacked arch
bent over to give us between three and two and a half feet of
height at the highest part. But not all the floor of the tunnel was
available for crawling crawling it now was, there was no possi-
bility of walking because the left-hand side carried a narrow belt
with shovels attached on which the hacked coal was carried away.
Here the atmosphere was steamy with heat and the miners who
crushed themselves against the entrance to let us pass were work-
ing stripped to the waist with the sweat running down their knotted
muscles. It was also much more dusty and we were constantly
coughing and choking with the particles in our throats. One felt
one would almost rather not take another breath than get that
mouthful of grit, but breathe one must. We were now in a tunnel
so low and narrow that there was no possibility of squeezing past
anyone, or changing our order. The character of the person one
found oneself next to assumed great importance. I had been a
little bit concerned for one of the younger girls who, I feared,
might panic. I wished I had put myself next to her, but it was
now too late. I even found myself grateful for the chance which
had fixed me between two sturdy men who would be strong enough
to push or pull if I actually got stuck. Our crawl was halted for a
few moments while urgings and scufflings went on at the rear,
and I realised with horror that Phillip, an exceptionally tall, large-
boned student, really was stuck. However, by crowding up on all
fours, scraping our knees and cutting our hands we were able to
leave enough space round him for him to lie flat and get free. But
it must have been very painful for him. I now see why miners are
stocky types. There was no chance of hesitating or trying to back
out, for no one could pass, no one could turn round; we must all
go on following our guide somewhere far forward there out of the
range of our lamps, seeing only the legs and hunched back of the
person in front, avoiding as far as possible the kicks of his foot
and the dust and mud thrown up. Now there were no more jokes;

144

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

it was not simply that all our energy was needed just to keep going
but that we were silent from awe. We seemed to be in a world
quite different from the world we had left, how many hours ago?
I remembered my last glimpse through that open window of the
grass and the blue sky and I had to make a concentrated effort
to visualise the colours blue and green. For many yards of our
crawl along the coal-face it was the sheer physical discomfort of
which we were chiefly aware. Then we began to hear a new sound.
The wall of the tunnel along which we crept was supported by
upright wooden posts at intervals and by cross beams resting on
them; one or two of these posts were now straining with a
squawking creak. Our guide and the miner crawling with us
became aware of this and the column was halted while shouts and
grunts echoed to and fro along the tunnel. So long as we were
moving there was something to do, one could ignore the nagging
apprehension by concentrating on the next movement, and telling
oneself that we had at last reached our goal, the coal-face. (I con-
fess I was less concerned with the coal-face than the thought that
the sooner we got on, the sooner we would be out of this.) But
now that we had stopped, our situation bore down on us and this
seemed a strange goal ever to have desired. We squatted there in
our small pools of light, seeing only the man in front, unable to
turn and look at the person behind. One eased one's body this
way and that in an effort to find a better posture, but nothing
would stop it, dread flooded into the mind creaking posts, surely
that was the first warning the miners heard? I thought of the
limitless tons of rock above us, my mind boggled at arithmetical
calculations of the weight held up by these fragile wooden props.
I remembered how, when I was a child, the martins used to nest
in holes in our quarry, and I had wondered how dare they trust
themselves and their brood to holes in that wall of soft sandstone?
Our little tunnel driven through the earth seemed as frail as the
martins' holes. By now I could hardly convince myself that there
was another world, the world that I had known all the years of
my life above ground. I reminded myself that on that world too,
night came but with night there came the light of the moon,
cool echo of the absent sun. One knew with absolute certainty
that the sun would rise again, warming and easing the world,
filling the trees with sap, swelling the grain we had been painting
in a cornfield last week, the students and I. Then suddenly came

145

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

the thought that if something happened, how should I ever be
able to write to their parents and confess that I had taken them
down a mine just as an outing! Then as quickly the other thought
I should not be there to write. In our college there had never
been a very strong feeling of the tutorial staff being a separate
hierarchy. "We made opportunities to meet the students on equal
terms and our position and experience was marked only by a few
formalities such as High Table. Yet the authority of position was
always subtly there. Here, down the mine, I felt at the same time
responsible for them and yet completely one of them. We had
seen the momentary trace of fear on one another's faces; we had
shared the hot and dirty crawl, the human indignity of pushing
our bodies through a small hole. Now jammed, as helpless as
they, without a word being exchanged I knew that we shared the
same welling of panic. For something to do, I picked a small piece
of shining coal from the seam with my finger-nails. Eventually a
prop of wood was passed along the side of us and we had to crouch
our legs further to the side in order to push it on with small
thrusts. Breathing grit, we waited in our places till it was propped
up in position, and after more interminable waiting word was
passed along to go forward again. The relief was immense. Our
one idea was to get to the end of the coal-face we thought no
further than that.

Just as we reached the place where the coal seam widened out
a little, there was room for us to pass three miners who were
kneeling with picks in small hollows in the side of the tunnel. I
could not see how they could wield the pick with any force behind
it in that restricted space. Pausing to let us pass, two of them
grinned at us, gaping bony as skulls in that light, but the third
stared morosely silent. When Ann paused beside him and asked
where the seam of coal he was working at was, he pointed for her
low down beside his knee. But in the dim light she could not see
it and with some considerable feeling he put his dirty hand on the
back of her neck and thrust her face down till her chin was in the
mud to show her. Did they then resent our coming as visitors to
their mine? We had, it is true, started in a light spirit, from mere
interest in our local industry, but by now there was no doubt that
our sympathy was all with the miners. After we escaped out of
this tunnel through a blast door, tumbling from it on to a heap of
coal-dust, slithering down five feet to the rock floor below and

146

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

picked ourselves up and stretched our limbs as far as we could,
one might have expected chatter and laughter. Instead there was
silent pantomime of relief from constriction, each of us reaching
into the bit of space around, obsessed by our own need to stretch.
One by one we came out of this absorption to look at one another
with new eyes. Our faces were almost completely black, and the
white of the eyes stood out in a clownish way. But now there was
no joking at one another's appearance. We had gone beyond that
to some other relationship. What mattered was that we were all
shaken and deeply moved, but we could not yet have said what
happened to us. This subdued group dragged its way back from
the exit of the coal-face tunnel to the main artery of the mine.
Even Geoff was deflated and, making up on me as we tramped
down the last slope, now, blessed relief, able to stretch ourselves
to our full height, he put his arm round my shoulder and said to
me with the utmost seriousness, 'They can keep their .10 a week
for me.'

When we reached the main hall of the mine again, we trailed
silent along the railway lines towards the shaft. I could hardly
believe that we would indeed climb into that toy cage again and
be lifted up to the surface. It was this sense of being in a com-
pletely alien world where the range of colour, the span of time,
had a different norm; that is what I find so hard to describe now.
After all, we were down the mine only for about four or five
hours. I do not believe now that any real danger threatened; per-
haps the creaking of the props in the coal-face tunnel was to the
miners just an everyday occurrence. Yet during that four hours
we had become welded together as if squeezed in a giant fist. Even
when we climbed into the cage I still dreaded that some wire
would break, some hitch would occur at the last moment, which
would prevent our returning where we belonged. Yet while we
ached for sun, greenness and our life's normality, we now under-
stood that it was to this world, to the dim underground, that the
miners belonged. They, who looked strangely out of place up
there, who slouched uncomfortably in their heavy clogs on the
tarmacadam roads and whose white eyes peered from inscrutable
faces, they were perfectly at home down here. Here their move-
ments and their clothes were appropriate; the very voices of
authority in which the merest boys had spoken to us, directing
our attention or giving us an order, spoke of the security of being

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

on their own ground. Now I understood a little more why the
outlook on life of the miners is different from that of other men,
why sons of miners often go down the pit as naturally as fisher
boys go to sea.

As for us, we gasped to get up into the clean air and sunlight.
The cage swept upward in that rush of air and very soon we were
stepping again on to that same rickety platform from which we
had taken off for the underworld. Stretching a stiff neck as we
balanced across the plank over the space below, my eyes met the
square of an open window which we had passed on our way down:
exactly divided, green grass below, blue sky above, now yellowed
with evening light. The effect of those colours on me, the satis-
fying depth and fullness of the green, seeming to bear within itself
all future grain, all milk and butter and honey, was like wealth
after starvation. The blue appeared to stretch into illimitable
distances and once again my eyes could stare and stare, pierce
the distance, and find no dark obstruction to shut in their range.
When we went out into the evening and went through the drill of
returning our lamps to the lamp-shed, returning our helmets to
the hook and divesting ourselves of the overalls we had been lent,
the students were very quiet. Still with our blackened faces we
climbed into the bus which was waiting to return us to the college.
Driving back through the countryside that summer evening we
looked with fresh astonishment at the shapes of cows, at the sheen
of horses in the fields and at the fragile perfection of hawthorn in
the hedges. As after being shut in a dark room during a long ill-
ness one greets the world again with sharpened sensibilities, every
sight thawed us out and we dared to believe we were restored.
Gradually on the half-hour's journey back I felt the oppression
lift, the tautness of the students stir. There was very little talking
but gradually the underlying ferment started to 'work' until there
rose a feeling of subdued excitement in the bus load. As we swung
down the curving drive to the college we all felt this was home-
coming, this was the familiar, the pleasant life to which we
belonged; but the strange thing was that we felt in some sense
that now we also belonged to the mine and the miners. This
spacious daylight world could not again wholly possess us.

"When the bus drew up outside the tall windows of the
eighteenth-century dining-room we saw students in neat suits and
pretty summer frocks sitting at polished tables, patterned with

148

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

glass and cutlery, eating their dinner with forks, not munching
coal-dusty bread from a tin box. They all looked unaware as we
had been unaware six hours before of what went on under our
familiar parkland. We wanted to shake their complacency, to
shout at them, c We have been down a mine? The civilised life that
we and they had led seemed suddenly too protected, too in-
complete. Though none of this was said, a tension was building
up to breaking point. The conflict of sympathies could not be
resolved so easily. I was concerned in case this tension should
find some destructive outlet, some angry gesture against that
element of artificiality which we too had formerly accepted. I was
just about to suggest briskly that we would all have to bath before
we went to dinner when I realised it would be a betrayal suddenly
to act the tutor again the moment I stepped back into the college.
I really wondered whether I would be able to persuade these
students at that moment to wash their dirty faces (now the badge
of our solidarity with the miners) or take off their filthy clothes
before they marched into the dining-room. We could not wash
off our experience. The need was to relieve that tension before we
could meet our fellows; yet we could not talk about our experi-
ence it was too raw. Besides, quite simply, we were very hungry
and there was our dinner on the side table, waiting to be eaten
when we were in a state to eat it. I hardly know how the idea
arose, I think it simply sprang into life among us, but when it was
voiced the students all turned to me, bright eyes staring from
blackened faces and said, * Yes, yes* then, the conventions of the
old life closing in c but you must go first, you will lead us/ A
college tutor, I yet knew that I was even more fundamentally one
of the group who had been down the mine. I said, *Yes, I'll go
first/ We huddled outside the dining-room door, coal-dusty,
sweaty as we were and clung close, while someone, I think it was
Geoff, said, 'Now we are going down in the cage, now we start
along the tunnel/ We crouched in the entrance hall and for a
moment sunk ourselves back into the experience. Slowly pushing
open the door of the elegant dining-room eyes fixed on that
remembered point where vision disappeared into the darkness I
led the doubled-up students in a re-enactment of our journey
through the mine. In the astonished silence of the diners, who
knew, of course, where we had spent the afternoon, we bent
from our stooping walk to a shambling crawl, then dropped on

149

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

all fours and finally we wound underneath the tables and between
their legs in that last agonizing creep through the tunnel which
was coal-face. We did all this in complete and serious silence.
Balanced on the razor edge between the solemn and the ludicrous,
we were, in effect, saying to them, *We have been down a mine;
we have dragged ourselves like animals on our bellies along the
coal-face; we have felt the horror of that moment when pit props
begin to creak, and we have come back to you not quite the same
people.' I sensed behind their astonishment an apprehension as
to how this would be received for formal dinner is a College
ritual. As our journey was almost completed and the file was
crawling back towards the door I passed under the High Table,
and taking from my dirty dungarees pocket the small piece of coal
I had clawed out, I wordlessly put it on the clean white plate in
front of our Principal to whom be all honour that he accepted
what had had to be done and allowed us to complete our silent
progress out of the dining-halL Outside, a cheerful burst of talk-
ing and chattering showed that the tension was released and
immediately I suggested that we should go and wash and without
more ado eat our dinner.

That was the day on which we went down the mine.

The sequel to this story came the next day and the next evening.
By good fortune I was due to take most of this group for the
whole day for 'Art Education'. This would normally have con-
sisted of a lecture from me, a discussion afterwards, reports by
students on books they had been studying, and a school visit or
reading time. When, the next morning, I met the students seated
in a circle waiting for me looking strangely clean and normal, I
felt there was only one thing to be done with that day. I said,
'The experience we had together yesterday was something im-
portant for all of MS. Let's not allow it to become overlaid with
all the things we ought to do, or drift away from us in a vague
emotional feeling, before we have made it fully our own by
pondering on it, clarifying it and perhaps communicating it. I
suggest that you go away, separately or in groups, and paint
or model it, or write or dance if you prefer' (for movement-study
and dance was one of the atts practised in our college), c but take
the whole day if you wish. We'll meet together in the evening.
Today, I shall not try to help you with your work or criticise it.
I am going to work too.'

150

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

I modelled my huge 'Miner', hoping to get some of the dignity
of a brooding Buddha into him. In the evening, the students and
I brought our work to show one another. There were many
paintings, some models, prose writings and one poem, which had
some of the labyrinthine character of the journey itseE Then we
were invited to see the dance which Ann had made with four
students who had not been down the mine, but whom she had
so moved with her description that they were able to compose a
dance with her, an evocation of that journey, danced to the music
of the Troll King's Daughter. I do not forget that moment when
they clung together on tiptoe then crashed to the floor as the cage
went down. In watching that dance we relived the emotions and
partly exorcised the nightmare of the cage.

One student who had never had the confidence to draw or paint
large figures but only rather elusive, tenuous wraiths, drew two
very large muscular miners, filling the paper as though they would
push out its edges which hemmed them in. Another painting was
the empty receding arches of the mine itself, like some of
the children's stark mines. We took time to look long at each
and every one revealed aspects of the experience important for
him.

So, calmed and eased by our work, and gathered together by our
common appreciation of each other's art, I felt that now we could
talk. Sitting round in a circle of comfortable chairs in my tutorial
room, the pale gold light (which would never again be taken com-
pletely for granted) slanting in on GeofFs flake-white shirt and
Diana's newly washed frizz of hair, I began to talk about the day
before, speaking a little of my own feelings of panic and of awe
and of the bond of shared emotion, while our attitude to the
miners and their job had changed hour by hour. Reminding them
again of the moments when we stood outside the dining-hall, and
gently teasing them about their unwillingness to wash, I affirmed
my own desire to assert with them our difference, from the rest of
the college, and yet our need to express to them the essence of our
experience because they were our own community. We discussed
together whether our action had been a little adolescent in out
need to make a protest there and then, in our compulsion to
relieve that overwhelming complex of emotions in some action.
We agreed that something had had to be done, and that it had
somehow made it possible to meet other people and to step back

151

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

into the life of the Hall. Some students said that they had not
wanted to talk about it that night. Room-mates had harried them
with questions, but the simple facts were no adequate reply.
Others evidently had stayed up half the night trying to explain.
One married woman had written a ten-page letter to her small
sons about the mine. But most spoke of how unbearable feeling
had been released in the dining-hall episode, and afterwards they
were dead tired and slept deeply. Sleep and renewed energy had
made possible the concentrated work of today, while the images
and emotions were still fresh. As the dusk fell we continued to
discuss, the long silences broken by someone remembering this or
that. I lit from habit the fire in the grate and the sight of coal,
which we had last seen in the seam, crackling into living fire,
brought back the tap of the miners' picks. In the darkness, and
after finally sitting silent for some time, we rose to collect our
works from where they had been laid aside, and one of the men
students whom I regarded as rather shallow and foppish stood
beside me in the half-dark and said, 1 shall not forget these two
days/

I have since asked myself what exactly it was that we tried to
do in our crawl round the dining-hall?

It certainly provided a bridge between the unbearable tension of
the mine itself and the poems and paintings which were produced
next day; while 'fixing' in cold storage as it were these experi-
ences, till we had eaten and slept and renewed ourselves sufficiently
to sort them out and deal with them. I do not think it would have
been possible to paint or dance the night before emotions were
too explosive, too undirected. It expressed our feeling of a close
group while at the same time it insinuated us back into the larger
group by sharing with them something of our experience.

Perhaps intuitively we produced a kind of ritual, differing from
most of the rituals we knew in that it was not repeated, but
sharing with ritual the purpose of dealing with strong feelings
which would have interfered with our absorption back into our
society. It was also a re-enactment of an original incident in modified
form, bereft of its real terror but following its pattern, the weaving
in and out movement of the original. Was it perhaps one of the
maze rituals I explored years after, as I have recounted; an initiation
of re-entry? Unless I am reading altogether too much into the
incident, the slightly comic aspect of crawling dirty and black-

152

THE VISIT TO A COAL-MINE

faced through a formal dinner also gave that release which we
all experience through that form of clowning which makes
sadness more bearable.

THE COAL-MINE

WRITTEN BY A WOMAN T.C. STUDENT ON THE DAY AFTER
THE VISIT TO A MINE

A strange world this,
a black tubular maze
Whitened by stone dust re-blackened by the contaminated air

A tangle of foetid roots

Screwing, probing, further, further

For the hard roughage to satiate Man's mechanical trees.

Monochromatic:

A domain only half revealed

By the pallid aura of torch light cast cold on hallucinatory walls

Acrid, dank,

An atmosphere seeping, insidious,

Its foulness wringing moisture from the dripping caverns and sweat
from overtaxed bodies.

Clutter of cables

Rusted wires like ravelled tentacles

Crawling sinuously through sombrous hollows, the pulsating lifelines
of those human scrabblers.

The gasping stillness
Lurking and rapaciously devouring

The hysterical clatter of the feverish machines that clang, clang, clang
inexorable, incessant.

J. R.

R.L. M 153

CHAPTER TEN
FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall
Come from the holy fire, perne m a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.

Sailing to 'Byzantium, w. B. YEATS

There is a striking simikrity between the war dance of the Siamese
fighting fishand the war dances of Javanese and other Indonesian peoples.
In both men and fish, the minutest detail of every movement is laid down
by immutable and ancient laws, the slightest gesture has its own deeply
symbolic meaning. There is a close resemblance between man and fish
in the style and exotic grace of their movements of restrained passion.
The beautifully refined form of movements betrays the fact that they
have a long historic development behind them and that they owe their
elaborateness to an ancient ritual.

King Solomon's Ring, KONRAD z. LORENZ

I COMMENTED, in the discussion of pictures of Caves, on how
the straightforward teaching of composition in relation to
these themes seemed to destroy the overtones which gave the
pictures their significance. Should we then, as teachers of art, not
teach composition? We know well that a picture needs a structure
but this structure may be derived from many different sources.
With junior children I should have thought that an emphasis on
the real subject being big in relation to the paper 1 gives the begin-
nings of structure within the picture space, as other things can
then be spatially related to that. It is usually timidity which shrinks
the subject to an insignificant object lost in the empty spaces
where the child himself feels lost, apprehensive of his world's
response to the experience he conveys, or crushed by former
criticism of his drawings. An emphasis on different viewpoints

1 With pen or pencil the paper itself can be small. Space can be, even in
a child's drawing, as much part of the real subject as it is in Chinese art,
e.g. a kite flying in a wide sky.

154

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

also enlarges experience and brings the awareness of a fresh
image to an ossified schema. A change of viewpoint may be as
simple as looking at familiar things from the side or one corner,
or under a microscope which may suggest depicting the ant's
eye view of the world, or the steeple-jack's.

Adolescents, especially in grammar schools, often take a more
intellectual approach to their painting, and may be intrigued by the
study of composition, but I think this is perhaps best done not in
'composition lessons', but in close relationship to the art of the
past, after a soaking in the pictures and sculpture themselves. The
stage of just having come out of the complete response described
by Berenson as 'the aesthetic moment' is often the time for this.
One's first experience of any work of art should surely be a total
response, not an analytical one.

There is also necessary the study of line, form and colour, in an
exploratory way, and from a more objective standpoint, but while
this must have a considerable place in the training of art students
I cannot myself feel that it should be the main basis of school work.

Such studies, if they have indeed been digested, as all intellectual
knowledge must be before we can forget it sufficiently to use it at
a deeper level, will play their part in the structure of pictures and
models. But in most of the illustrations shown, the painters and
modellers had had in fact no teaching in composition. Many of
them had had no opportunity to soak themselves in the kind of
pictures from which they might have gained it unconsciously.
When the subject, Mother and Child, resulted in formed and
structured pictures of a peculiarly satisfying kind (and I remember
from long ago some pictures from Marion Richardson's classes
in which I had marvelled at this), I had concluded that the painters
were unconsciously using aesthetic forms derived from the many
works they had seen on this subject, They might well have seen
the Raphael and Duccio, not only the Margaret Tarrent versions
of this, and composition is one thing which can come over even
in crudely coloured or black-and-white reproductions. But when
we consider the cave pictures, a few of the children had not seen
a real cave, and most of them, so far as we could discover, had
not seen an artist's picture of one (as distinct from a photograph).
Yet, where the idea was allowed to evoke some of its profound
mystery, form arose naturally a kind of artless art. The very
satisfying relationship of forms in the models (Dlus. 8a, b, c),

I5J

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

several of which were made blindfold, also show this sense of
form. It could be argued that the human body is akeady a sym-
metrical structure, but the body can convey any one of the range
of human emotions, and here, surely, the modellers portraying a
mother have found enclosing and protecting forms very cogent to
convey their feelings. In the other two (Illus. ya and yb) no clear
idea seems to have been present but the result is an almost abstract
form which conveys feminality to most observers. My Family
(Illus. }c), The Wood (6a) and the Harbour paintings all use
curving forms, suggestive of enclosure.

These curving forms contrast interestingly with another group
having a strong vertical or horizontal axis. Although done in
different classes but all except one of the waterfall pictures, done
by boysthey constitute for me a group puzzling because they
show an odd and unconventional viewpoint.

Among many others there are the two pictures of Bulls (Illus.
zyb and zyc), painted from the front so that the bull appears to be
charging one head on, a most effective and frightening but very
difficult view to draw; one water scene of a flood with a sea-wall
stretching level across the picture space and the sea breaking
through in two places so that there is an uncompromising hori-
zontality and symmetry (Illus. zya). Using the extreme frontal
viewpoint, but painted in a flat, decorative style, are two bold
pictures of The Three Kings (Illus. 8b) in which they are
represented full face and equally spaced so that there is again
symmetry; also a harvest festival drawn from above the altar
(Illus. .zSa), a view the child could never have seen. In the last two
instances the view chosen is in fact the c god's eye view' of the
scene. These were not children who would have deliberately set
themselves problems of viewpoint nor had they had this suggested
to them, and they had been drawing profiles and three-quarter
views on other occasions. This is the method of representation
known in the history of art as 'frontality', but even if we conclude
that these adolescents had seen representations in this style, why
did they adopt it, instead of their more usual way of representing,
just for these particular pictures? The viewpoint chosen does
create a powerful, awe-inspiring effect, but this has certainly not
been consciously calculated by the painters. How did they come to
arrive at such a difficult viewpoint, which is not that of an im-
partial spectator, but seems to imply some particular relationship

156

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

with the thing painted? In all these pictures and several more
where this frontality was used, and where consequently the picture
had this curious horizontal-vertical structure of great strength and
sometimes starkness elements of fear seem to be present, yet the
painter is not abandoned to his feelings, however intense; a cer-
tain distance is preserved and emotion emerges in a structured
form.

These pictures reminded me of Byzantine art with its flatness
and frontality of the figures, its economy and simplicity of design,
its lack of spatial depth. They reminded me inevitably of the
Justinian and Theodora panels at Ravenna (Illus. 2pb), whose
impact, after knowing them only from reproductions, is striking,
for they are placed in the sides of the apse of the church, and yet
they in no way lead the eye to the great central figure of the Christ
in the conch, but form self-contained centres themselves. The
Emperor and Empress were, it is true, thought of as being Christ's
regents on earth and worthy of veneration as such, and you are
never allowed to forget this in San Vitale. As you approach the
altar, on which a church is normally centred, you are compelled to
turn away because these panels demand that you confront them. In
pondering why these adolescents adopted such a strange view-
point for some pictures, it seemed worth asking why the artists
of this particular period departed from the relative naturalism of
the preceding age which must have been the art to which they
were brought up (for example 'Christ as the Good Shepherd' in
late-Roman style of just less than a century before is only a few
yards away in the tomb of Galla Placidia (Illus. 29a). Why did they
accept the limitations of strict frontality? Why should they sacrifice
the variety of viewpoints, the recession of the background and
setting of the subject in illusory landscape, for this stark, dramatic
viewpoint?

A passage in Hauser's Social History of Art* gives an explana-
tion which might provide a clue.

The artistic aim [of the Byzantine artists of this period] was that
art should be the expression of an absolute authority, of a super-
human greatness and mystic unapproachability. The endeavour im-
pressively to represent personalities who demanded reverence reaches

1 A. Hauser, Social History of Art, p. 142, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
London, 1951.

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

its climax in Byzantine art. The method used in the attempt to achieve
this, was, in the first place frontality, as it had been in Ancient-
Oriental art. The psychological mechanism which this method sets
in motion is two-fold: on the one hand, the rigid attitude of the
figure portrayed frontally induces a corresponding spiritual attitude
in the beholder: on the other hand, by this approach, the artist
manifests his own reverence for the beholder . . . This deference
is the inner meaning of frontality ... By means of frontality
every figure-representation takes on to some extent the features
of a ceremony. . . . Everything here is awe-inspiring in its regal
magnificence, with all human, subjective and arbitrary elements
suppressed.

Is it outrageous to suggest that these pictures of secondary
modern adolescents hold a faint echo of Byzantine hieratic art?
They do, it is true, portray the characteristics of the objects
representing the force of the sea rushing through the sea wall, the
fierceness of the bull as it charges but it is not, any more than in
Byzantine or Hittite art, a 'visual image* (e.g. see the enormously
enlarged heads of the bulls) but reminds one of that special sort
of image called an ikon and an ikon is made with the express
purpose of creating an emotional state in the onlooker. An ikon
is a symbol-image in that its form is a simplified abstraction which
'means* to the initiated very much more than it reveals. It is also
a symbol in the deeper sense of containing an archetypal idea
the virgin-mother, sacred animal, the miraculous incident and it
is quite definitely a pathway through which we can and are
explicitly intended to enter deeper levels of consciousness, and
call on a strength greater than our own. This strength we gain
through identifying ourselves with the 'subject* of the ikon. 1
Perhaps frontality was used by these boys in the pictures of the
bulls and the sea-wall both to paint out their fear and also to
identify themselves with the strength and fierceness. We cannot
walk past these pictures any more than the Ravenna panels; we
must face them as they face us and sense the unseen currents which
link us to such works as firmly as electric wires.

Although it is true that perhaps the commonest view of a water-
fall is from the front, a kind of stark frontality was also used in
many waterfall pictures, and identification with a waterfall is more

1 For a most interesting discussion of this, see Otto Demus, Byzantine
Mosaic Decoration.

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

difficult to understand. Yet, without being completely conscious
of it, this is exactly what I had induced when my class painted
waterfalls by the candlegrease method described in 'The Themes
Themselves'. With the candle in their hands the painters concen-
trated on the thought of water, its force, its fall, and let their
bodies express that, leaving the trace of their movement to be
revealed when the wax threw off the colour later. The very fact
that they were not at the time consciously 'making a picture* at all,
allowed them to be more free and expressive in their movements.
They were able to concentrate on the idea of water without worry-
ing about technique. I noticed that many of them had their eyes
closed, and some were standing, legs apart, swaying on the balls
of their feet, submerged in the rhythmic movement. In all cases
the waterfall dominated the picture, rather than forming part of a
varied landscape. These pictures are the more powerful for this
concentration. A similar suppression of background and of in-
essential detail is found in many of the historic examples of
frontality. Perhaps the action to which I had invited them bore
some aspects of ritual, in that it enacted an event they had watched
the falling water and in that they used repetitive movements
to immerse themselves in it.

The Theodora and Justinian mosaics called up for me two
phrases of the biologist Lorenz 1 in describing antics of the
Siamese fighting fish, Veritable orgies of mutual self-glorification'
and 'there is a close resemblance between man and fish in the
style and exotic grace of their movements of restrained passion
[which] owe their elaborateness to ancient ritual*.

The ritualistic element common to some of the children's
paintings and to Byzantine art, and Tinbergen's use of the word
'ritual' for fish courting and fish combats, prompted the question
of how far a rigid formula of expression (in painting, mosaic,
church ceremony, social intercourse) invites, provokes or demands
a response from within an equally circumscribed sphere. If we
enter this arena, so to speak, can we enter it only in terms of the
traditional movements of the game?

An element of this process may lie further back in a primary
part of the human make-up, which is usually hidden in the com-
plexities of individual personality and the complicated behaviour
of civilised societies. While I am far from suggesting that human
1 Komrad Z. Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring, Great Pan, p. 45,

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

behaviour can be described in terms of animal or bird behaviour,
certain facts are thought-provoking. Lorenz 1 andTinbergen 2 have
shown that many young things respond immediately after birth,
before they have had time to learn any responses from their
parents or from experience, to specific sign stimuli. For instance,
chickens Vith the eggshells still adhering to their tails dart for
cover when a hawk flies overhead, but not when the bird is a gull
or a duck, a heron or a pigeon*. They react to the shape of the
hawk moving forward (for the same shape cut in wood and
moved backwards on a wire leaves them unaffected). As Joseph
Campbell 3 puts it:

'The image of the inherited enemy is already sleeping, in the
nervous system, along with the well proven reaction. Furthermore/
he goes on to say, 'even if all the hawks in the world were to vanish
their image would still sleep in the soul of the chick never to be
aroused however, except by some accident of art, for example, a
repetition of the clever experiment of the wooden hawk on a wire.
With that experiment (for a certain number of generations at any
rate) the obsolete reaction of the flight to cover would recur, and
unless we knew about the earlier danger of hawks to chicks, we
should find the sudden eruption difficult to explain. "Whence", we
might ask "this abrupt seizure by an image to which there is no
counterpart in the chicken's world? Living gulls and ducks, herons
and pigeons leave it cold, but the work of art strikes some very
deep chord." Have we here a clue to the problem of the image of a
witch in the nervous system of a child?'

Leaving on one side the point that Campbell weights the situa-
tion when he calls Tinbergen's wooden hawk c a work of art' it
might be or it might not this response to unknown sign stimuli
is surely relevant to the discussion of the emotion aroused in both
makers and spectators by some of the 'strange objects' discussed
earlier in this book. It is the image of a moving hawk (not the idea
of a hawk) that is 'already sleeping in the soul of the chick*. The
man who said that he Mid not know what he had made but he had
not been so happy for years', and the little girl who ran up with
her model and said 1 don't know what it is, but isn't it lovely?'

1 Konrad Z, Lorenz, Kmg Solomorfs Ring, Great Pan.

2 Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, O.U.P., 1951.

3 Joseph Campbell, using Tinbergen's material, in The Masks of God,
Seeker and Warburg, London, 1950.

1 60

2$ (a) Figure with elongated face, rudimentary limbs. Boy, //. cf. (b). Aztec figure.
(i) Mother-Image? Girl, n. cf. (d) Neolithic Mother-goddess.

I

a

1

oi

-M

.3
'c3

27(0) The Seawall. Wax and watercolour, showing symmetrical, frontality. Boy, 14,
(b) and (c) Bull, from a. number showing frontal viewpoint. Boy, 13 and Boy, 12.

28(0) 'Harvest Festival', in strong vermilion, orange, green, black. Boy,iij. (b) 'The
Three Kings', in strong reds, golds, purple, black. Boy, 14.

z<)(a) Christ as The Good Shepherd, in the Orpheus tradition. Late Roman style.
(b) Justinian and His Train, showing Byzantine frontality and formality.

3o(tf) Shell-Like Model. Woman student. First clay experience, blindfold session,
(b) Whorl. Man student) begun blindfold, (c) Nose, middle stage of a pillar turned
into a face. Woman, (d) Mother and Child. Boy. First clay experience. Blindfold

session.

31 Stages of one model. Woman. 'Blindfold session.

32 Stages of Phyllis' Work, (a) 'People round a fire.' (V) 'Oranges on a dish.'
(c] e The Eastern Princess.' (d] Self-Portrait. (e) The Wise Old Man of the East.'

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

had no idea, no intellectual concept of their work, but they had a
shape which seems to have been intrinsically satisfying satisfy-
ing, I suggest, because it embodied in a traditional image and
form a theme significant to the human race and to these two as
individuals.

On the other hand, our Themes did present ideas, but what
had first drawn my attention to them was a certain to me and
to others intuitive fitness in the forms which emerged when
children pondered on them. These forms, varied as they are, yet
sharing an underlying rhythm, remind one of the movements or
dance by which certain fish and birds respond to a 'signal* from
the partner. It would be possible to regard the material on which
much of this book is based as a parallel to just such a chain
reaction as biologists describe in the elaborate 'ceremonies' of
animals with the proviso that for human beings not only one
reaction is possible, but a number from which a choice is, largely
unconsciously, made. Robert, moved by his own strong reaction
to his Derbyshire caves, set the subject with his children and,
moved by the forms of their paintings, I included it in the list of
Themes; later, when the teachers suggested it to their classes, it
evoked pictures which we recognise as embodying a fundamental
idea known to us.

That creatures are specially sensitive to the 'imprinting' of
sign stimuli at certain periods of their lives is well known. Lorenz
gives the charming example of ducklings claiming the first large
creature moving on their own level which is seen soon after birth
as their mother (in this instance himself) and becoming irrevocably
attached to it. When excited by nearness to its own territory r , the male
Stickleback will fight a rival he would ignore in other localities.
When the male Stickleback is excited by the sight of a pregnant female
(and a vaguely similar cardboard model with swollen abdomen
will precipitate this behaviour, whereas a real female Stickleback
without will not) he reacts with certain precise movements which
stimulate her in turn. But Tinbergen 1 has also shown that with
the coming of maturity (what we should call adolescence in humans)
in Greenland, Eskimo dog develops the capacity for receiving and
responding to such stimuli almost overnight.

1 N. Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, O.U.P., 1951, p. 150. Quoted by
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God.

161

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

All dogs of an Eskimo settlement have an exact and detailed
knowledge of the topography of the territories of other packs; they
know where attacks from other packs must be feared. Immature
dogs, however, do not defend the territory. Moreover, they often
roam through the whole settlement, very often trespassing into other
territories, where they are promptly chased. In spite of these fre-
quent attacks, during which they may be severely treated, they do
not learn the territories* topography and for the observer their
stupidity in this respect is amazing. While the young dogs are grow-
ing sexually mature, however, they begin to learn the other terri-
tories and within a week their trespassing adventures are over. In
two male dogs the first copulation, the first defence of territory, and
the first avoidance of strange territory, all occurred within one week.

The susceptibility of human adolescents to new patterns of
thought cannot be demonstrated so precisely, but that firm
Imprinting' of new ideas to which one is exposed in certain
emotionally heightened situations can be demonstrated by auto-
biographies. Most primitive societies and highly civilised ones in
the Near East, Egypt and Greece up to the late classical era seem
to have provided the occasions and the ceremonies to turn such a
biological factor to good account rather than leaving it to com-
mercial exploitation. The function of the arts in all this was -well
known to such peoples.

Moreover, that the capacity for producing and enjoying works
of art is, as it were, built into the human structure at fundamental
levels, that we need to operate thus and are deeply satisfied 'in. doing
so, fits in with the idea of what biologists call 'super-normal sign
stimuli*. (The term innate releasing mechanism (IRM) has been
coined to designate the inherited structure in the nervous system that
enables an animal to respond to the sign stimuli which triggers off
the appropriate behaviour.) Tinbergen writes, 1 'The innate releas-
ing mechanism usually seems to correspond more or less with the
properties of the environment, the object or situation at which the
reaction is aimed. . . . However, close study reveals the remark-
able fact that it is sometimes possible to offer stimulus situations
that are even more effective than the natural situation. In other
words, the natural situation is not always optimal.'

The male grayling butterfly pursues the female in flight, and
shows a preference for the females of darker hue. If a female
1 Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct > London, O.U.P., 1951, p. 223.

162

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

darker than anything that is known in nature is presented to a sexually
motivated male he will pursue it in preference to the darkest
female of the species. Here is an 'inclination', a reaching after
something which cannot be satisfied within nature, or in the
natural circumstances in which the male grayling finds himself.
This opens up all kinds of speculation not only about the neces-
sity of art, but of 'the desire of the moth for the star*, and the
unfulfilled, almost inexpressible yearnings of human beings.
On the plane of art and ritual, Campbell writes of this example:

Obviously the human female with her talent for play, 1 recognised
many millenniums ago the power of the supernormal sign stimulus;
cosmetics for the heightening of the lines of her eyes have been
found among the earliest remains of the Neolithic Age. And from
there to an appreciation of the force of rituallsation, hieratic art,
masks, gladiatorial vestments, kingly robes, and every other humanly
conceived and realised improvement on nature, is but a step or a
series of steps.

With a warning against equating art with improvement on
nature, we may relate this to the children adopting ritualistic
conventions such as frontality in certain situations. While Tin-
bergen gives many examples of courtship displays which involve
a set of trigger mechanisms, each one designed to touch off the
next impulse in the partner (thus narrowing down the selection
of a mate to one from the species which responds in the appro-
priate way) Kenneth Simmons 2 gives from the Great Crested
Grebes an example of another sort of ritual to discharge an emotion.
In the first ten to fifteen days of life the young Grebes are carried
much of the time on the back of one or the other parent, which
gives time for the waterproof coat to dry and saves them from
predatory pike. When the young are between ten and fourteen
days old, the parent tilts or pushes them off, and will even dive to
dislodge them. Is it at this time that, after implicit trust, the first
feelings of apprehension enter? Each parent adopts one or two of
the chicks (broods are usually three or four) and takes charge of
the feeding. *One parent Great Crest may not only refuse to feed

1 He uses the word *play' throughout, not in a light but in a very funda-
mental sense.

2 In a broadcast on Dec. 8th, 1957, which was an extension of comments
on this ceremony made in the Aviculturd Magazine, Vol. 61, 1955.

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

the other's young, but actually drives them off. The young soon
learn to appreciate the situation and become apprehensive towards
the parent which does not feed them. 5 But, as the time comes for
them to fend for themselves even the supporting parent shows
aggression. The young Grebe c may snatch food very quickly from
the adult, turning away to make off at the same instant. All
this gives the impression that the young one is very apprehensive
of the adult. The parents not infrequently show aggressive
behaviour to their larger young.* As time goes on the parents are
provoked to ever stronger expressions in order to drive the young
away. Since Grebes nest singly on a stretch of water the feelings
of uncertainty and fear this arouses become set in a pattern
towards all Grebes in adult plumage. But such a pattern, when
the maturing youngsters move away to other waters, would pre-
vent the approach to a potential mate, and a continuation of the
reproductive cycle. Simmons suggests that some of the displays
he has seen are a ritual re-enactment of fight, flight, and reconcilia-
tion, which in fact have taken place in the history of the race, but
had not, in fact, taken place in the history of that particular bird.
He cites the display which shows the two birds, in a tentative
phase of courting, picking up the dark weed from the bottom of
the pond the weed which they will use in building their nest
and with it in their beaks rushing towards one another across the
water as they do when genuinely attacking till he thought that
they would collide. 'With the impetus of their motion the two
birds came actually to touch each other with their breasts . .
the birds would have fallen forwards had each not supported the
other. Only the very tip of the body was in the water. In such a
breath-taking union they sway together for a few moments/

Simmons saw this ceremony a dozen times in the same form
over several seasons. He, whose knowledge of Grebes is un-
challenged, believes that in this mock battle the fear and aggres-
sion which had been conditioned to appear at the sight of another
Grebe are exploded, and the pair can settle down to an affectionate
lifelong partnership. This is a ritual for the release of an inhibiting
emotion.

I said in Chapter III that children and adolescents would use
whatever subject we gave them to work out emotions and pres-
sures building up inside them at that time. Would it be fat-fetched
to explain this curious change to c ikon style' and frontality in these

164

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

cases, as an intuitive device to work off the fear which might have
paralysed them in the real situation and so be able to make con-
tact with the features of the subject which attracted them?

In many religious and social rituals, a certain range of emotions
is roused not only by the weighty associations of the occasion, but
by physical elements of form and pattern in the ceremony itself;
by the colour, by the shape of the building and its furniture, and
by our own or others' ritual movements kneeling to pray, rising
to honour, walking in procession and so on. In a ritual we are not
spectators, we take part actually, or vicariously. If the ritual has,
over a period of time, evolved an aesthetic form as the re-enact-
ment of some deeply significant historical event, such as the Last
Supper, or the symbolic representation of a universal theme, such
as the loss and restoration of Persephone in the Eleusinian
mysteries then in identifying ourselves with the principals
celebrating it, we are invoked in what is itself a work of art.
We can, without being creative in an original form, be satisfied
in a way bearing some resemblance to the traditional craftsman's
content in shaping age-old forms, or to re-treading the steps of
traditional dance.

Perhaps much of the art I have been describing is a kind of
ritual not in the sense of c mere rituaF, 'empty ritual*, but in
the sense of identifying ourselves with the subject within that
hieratic framework which gives 'distance'. This would explain
why one feels that the boy who painted the Seawall has a deep
sense of this force but is not overwhelmed by it; why the two
Bulls are terrifying yet the boys are not cringing they are also
the bulls, and draw strength from the bulls, and know the glory
of being behind that immense head as well as the terror of being
in the path of it.

Rudolf Laban once said to me, when we were discussing the
effect of dance on the emotions, 'The ritual dances and the com-
munal rites are gone. Religion has lost its wide appeal. Now only
art remains. It is all in the hands of you art teachers.' As so often,
I did not fully understand what he meant, but perhaps it was this. 1

I have no doubt that many readers will have very great mis-
givings about the method I have suggested, fearing that it will
simply result in a giving up of the restraining, controlling part of

I 1 do not mean to imply that art can be a substitute for religion, but
through the rites and forms of art we make contact with the infinite.

165

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

ourselves to an unbridled emotionalism. Any loosening of the
carefully won control of 'the discriminating ego' can be dangerous;
but in order to reach these new syntheses, chaos cannot be avoided:
the ego-control must be flexible. The crucial question is to what
shall we sacrifice it? Today our adolescents, when rebellious or
frustrated, are surrounded by more degrading themes which evoke
their emotional response. A mark of art is that it is not diffuse, not
merely emotionally enveloping. It has a structured form which is
the essential embodiment of its theme. The archetypal themes we
used and many other themes could do the same did seem to
result in a form which hardly suggests a mere wallowing in
emotion, and the painters and modellers, after intense immersion
in them, seemed to come to rest at a new point of stability.
Marjorie Hourd has written: 1

One of the reasons why it is difficult to forsake the chronological
in writing and the photographic in pictorial art is the fear of being
at the mercy of the irrational parts of one personality; quite simply
it is the fear of getting to know oneself.

Perhaps when people of any age let go of the discriminating ego
they do become terrified of what emerges and their panic efforts to
close down the battens again may be reflected in hard, harsh, often
black, linear structures. But I myself feel that all these pictures
illustrated show a sense of structure that has yet not destroyed
the autonomous life of the subject not killed the thing that was
feared by making a dead drawing of it. Rather has the 'artist'
drawn on its vitality, as is apparent in the independent life of the
picture, and portrayed the organic structure of a living theme.

Moreover, contrary to an opinion expressed with great authority
in our time, I found that, while the more permanent 'personality
type' of the child or adolescent might often be detectable in his
work as in his movement or gesture the mood of the moment
was the determining factor, because the research showed that a
person painted and modelled differently in different atmospheres.
This mood might come from the need to exorcise fear or derive
warmth, as in the ritualistic pictures; or it might come from bodily
identification as in the waterfalls and some of the models; or it
might come from plumbing one's own depths through these arche-
typal themes or from all three. Often a c class mood' of con-

1 M. Hourd, On Coming into Their Ovm 9 Heinemann, London, 1959. p. 20.

166

FORM IN SYMBOLS AND IKONS

templation resulted, for many normally extroverted youngsters
found themselves drawn in by the temper of the group, which the
teacher can sense and guide. Finally the responsibility for the
general mood and atmosphere created during a lesson is the
teacher's.

These themes, nourished on the compost heap of ages, have
vitality more than most. But any work, if it is to nourish us as
spectators as well as having a therapeutic value for its maker, must
have an autonomous life of its own as art.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA
AND THE MEDIUM

Nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,

W. B. YEATS.

IN the course of this study, in the painting- but especially in
the modelling-classes which I have described, I became inter-
ested in the way in which the first shape is modified in the
course of creating even quite a simple work. Each of us with any
experience in the medium brings to the act of creating the
memories (with their overtones of the teaching), the frustrations
and the satisfactions of former attempts. So each succeeding
attempt becomes more complex to study. Therefore it appeared
worth trying to study the/r// contact of students of different ages
with a medium new to them, to catch the act of creation naked,
as it were. I was taking many day and weekend courses at this
time, where clay was new to most of my students and, an additional
advantage, clay-work is less likely to induce imitation of known
masterpieces than painting is.

Those who start painting in adult life come with a stock of
second-hand and often trivial images in which they try to clothe
their individual feelings. Gifted teachers have shown that it is
possible to by-pass this difficulty by various means, but with clay
there is much less preconception of what is accepted as 'art*.
Therefore, I chose studies in clay for this part of the investigation.
Clay lacks the immediate attraction and seduction of colour, and so
relies completely on the form, and its apparently inert mass does
not even limit and enclose the form as the rectangle of a paper
or a canvas does. Precisely for these reasons, and because it is so

168

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA AND MEDIUM

responsive to the touch, it often gives rise to a very personal
language at the first attempt.

The disadvantage of choosing a new material is that there is little
opportunity to go far enough in the period under study to produce
anything which has value as a work of art. For (though it is
difficult to separate them) I was not interested primarily in clay
as a diagnostic or therapeutic material but as one which could
offer children and adults the experience of shaping, of creating
coherent and expressive forms within the tradition of their culture.

In asking what exactly is experienced in contact with a material,
I have used three sources of information: my own experience as
modeller and potter; 1 observation of the shapes produced in the
course of working and how they are modified; the comments of
the makers. The comments on which I have chiefly drawn here
were made immediately after completing a first piece of work in
clay (when this is not so, I give the circumstances) by children,
by students, by teachers (of all subjects) and other adults. I intro-
duced them to modelling when they were blindfold because I
found they got a more immediate contact with the clay, that thus
they concentrated more on the aspects of touch and three-
dimensional form. Also, they did not get distracted by their
neighbours or become self-conscious about their own products. 2

Before trying to analyse this process, here is a description of
the first experience of modelling blindfold by a Physical Education
tutor who joined a students' session.

I became completely absorbed in what I was doing and felt that
being blindfolded isolated me from the other people in the room
although we were so close we were almost touching, and one could
hear their breathing. One was aware of the intense absorption of
everyone. As the students had settled down with their clay and got
out their scarves, there was quite a lot of cheerful chatter and
laughter as they blindfolded themselves or one another. I had
expected that this would continue through the period of modelling,
especially as one might expect some self-consciousness and em-
barrassment with so many people modelling for the first time but

1 1 have written on this in New Era, April 1958.

2 But one sensitive adult has told me that she found it quite intolerable to
be blindfold with the day and that the shut-in feeling inhibited her. It is not
necessary to blindfold the younger children they work mostly by touch
anyway.

R.L. N 169

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

the strange thing was that as soon as our fingers touched the clay
we each became completely absorbed in our isolation with what we
were doing and there was complete silence for a long period.

What is happening during this initial meeting with day? Two
elements which must be paramount are the tactile and kinaesthetic
sensations though I am not suggesting that the experience is ever
limited to this. Something of the importance of these emerged in
the incidents of the little girl who did not want to get dirty and
made nothing her first session, and of the two boys who said that
they were making a mine but who, instead of adding convincing
detail, just pushed their hands in and out of the holes they had
made.

The first work with clay may be experienced by older students 1
as a thoughtful exploration of its qualities.

The first thing I experienced was the amount of resistance or
compliance of the clay to grasping and pressing, flattening and
twisting.

Then there is conscious pleasure in plastic moulding.

I did not start modelling with any particular shape in mind. I was
only concerned with pressing, squeezing and twisting the clay and
thoroughly enjoying its plastic qualities.

And

This morning, being blindfolded, I spent some time just enjoying
the feel of the clay. I am afraid I cannot recall any of my thoughts
while I worked except perhaps that I was enjoying myself because
no one could see what I was doing. I was more concerned with
feeling than with thought: pleasure in the feel of the shape I could
make by drawing the clay out with my thumb and first finger and
the narrowness at the edge, in poking my fingers into the clay and
in moulding the clay around my fingers.

Many other records describe such feelings.

Next, there are body images which arise very early in the process
and possibly have associations with the texture and consistency of
the clay itself. For instance very many of the eleven-year-old
group to which Margaret belonged produced pillar shapes, both
boys and girls (but more boys), which may be seen as exploring

1 These extracts are from accounts written just afterwards by three students
of about nineteen,

170

AND THE MEDIUM

how far the clay would pull up straight (if pulled up at an angle it
often falls down), but which would be interpreted by most
psychiatrists as penis shapes. There are also many scooped hollow
shapes, e.g. the shell (Illus. ya in Chap. IV). A Movement student
also speaks of finding she had made a shell. (The shell is, of course,
an age-old symbol of femininity Venus herself was born from
one.)
Here is a different body image,

I took the clay in my right hand and squeezed hard and found
that I had made deep hollows and divided the clay into three parts.
I then had the idea of a body with two listening ears and saw in
my mind a picture of the internal auditory mechanism. This I tried
to convey in the more central part through a tortuous series of
communicating apertures. The outer parts I moulded as ears or at
any rate spread appendages. 1

A young woman student writes most vividly of evolving her
model in another relationship to her own body.

The clay is very cold and I must work it and hold it in my hands,
and move it quickly about until it becomes warm and living. I will
work it into a smooth, smooth ball which fits into the hollow of one
hand. I will push it thin in the middle like a big bubble which bursts
and must be recaptured again by the larger mass. I will make of it
a long thing which can be held in both hands at once.

I like the feeling of the now warm and moving clay. I should like
to have something which is held light in one hand but which is
within the firm grasp of the other. I wrap my fingers caressingly
around this thing which is mine and it in turn encloses my thumb
with itself. It is a thing made to be held by me.

In addition, there are the ideas which arise in the mind. We
cannot of course separate any of these things in the act, they
happen at the same time or they flow into one another, so that
it is seldom possible to distinguish cause and effect, (e.g. it would
be difficult to say whether the last excerpt was more of a body
image or a mental idea). I suspect that some hint of the significance

1 Three students in this group of twenty-four, to which this modeller be-
longed, commented on ear associations in their models, but they were stud-
ents at the Movement Studio and would be conscious of sound and music.
One of these writes, *It was an experiment of great interest and the assimi-
lation of listening and imagination definitely influenced the resultant shape
of the model.*

171

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

of the pleasure of stroking the pillar shapes was just on the verge
of consciousness when some censor in the boys modified the
representation to an 'acceptable' object. One would not expect
to have a verbal description of this moment from the children,
but in several instances I saw them pause in the slow physical
enjoyment of this shape, freeze still for a moment, and then start
with a new directiveness to give the clay the distinctive features
of the candlestick or lighthouse or another object which they
named (e.g. Illus. za, b, c). One such that took shape in this way
was turned into a head in a very pointed cap. On another occasion
a woman teacher who had been working with a literature group
(in which she had been arguing with two of the men) rushed into
the clay room, seized a lump of clay and pulled it fiercely, violently,
into a pillar shape, which she after a moment turned into the nose
on a face, pressing out a flat circle round it on which she added eyes
and mouth. Illustration 3oc shows the middle stage of this work.
Here are some descriptions of how an idea occurred from work-
ing the material (although these children and students had been
told their final object need not represent anything at all):

A boy of eleven in a grammar school, who made blindfold
the model in Illustration 3od, when asked how he came by the
idea said,

I just stroked the clay beneath my fingers and I thought it was like
a woman so I put a baby in her arms.

An older man student wrote

My first feeling was extraordinarily strong. I felt how brutally
I was attacking the clay, and how tense my hands were. I made a
conscious effort to have a finer touch in my fingers which meant
that my whole body carriage had to be altered and I seemed to fidget
about for a long while until I obtained a sufficiently calm position.
All during this while I had simply pummelled the clay, squeezing
and twisting it in a very rough way.

I was then conscious of an outward curve arriving. My thought
was immediately *how typical of me and similar to my paintings and
movement*. My next conscious thought was that it felt like a flower,
possibly an orchid, but I did not try to make it really life-like. 1

1 A man Movement student. It is interesting to compare this with the
flower of another man (Illus. yb) and his comment, 1 think it is the calyx
of a flower but I was thinking of my wife all the time.*

172

AND THE MEDIUM

And again, a woman said

Earthy feeling something from a river-bed which still had the
smoothness from running water. Fingers poked into it and made
hollows which could be smoothed into grooves and gave the idea
of carving in church doors.

Then I had a new piece of clay. Again something from earth.
Three long points came and then a tree-trunk entered my thoughts.
Something which was more living came with playing and eventually
I took off my bandage to reveal a primitive piece of prehistoric life.

This, of course, is quite different from starting either with an
'idea' to represent (e.g. a woman, a foal) or an 'idea' with practical
considerations to fulfil as one might in pottery, e.g. a vessel to
keep liquids hot or a wide bowl to hold fruit.

But the associations of the idea may draw the modeller (or
painter) away from the work itself and become a monologue
instead of a 'conversation' between man and material. The works
of the Movement students were characterised particularly by a
sense of flowing and balanced forms. But one of them, who pro-
duced a trivial and cliche* swan, wrote thus:

Almost immediately I felt the hollow of a swan's back emerging
to a finely pointed tail, but then I did not concentrate on what I was
doing?- because swans are connected with the place I am happiest in
the world the Helford River and I enjoyed the memory of the
sun on the water and the tingling exhilaration of being alone on a
bright summer's morning. I could not get its smoothness and round-
ness of form, and they are such graceful creatures.

It is interesting to compare this with the second long excerpt
later in this chapter in which the modeller also tries to make a
swan because of her strong associations of pleasure with the
memory, but realises later that they were literary associations.
The whole genus of commercial pottery swans and paintings of
swans with cloying sentimental associations are a bog from whose
clutches only an innocent or a genius can rise to new forms.

In addition, there are considerations of 'pure* or abstract form
which may be unconscious in young children or beginners but
are often an important consideration to the mature artist. Here
are some comments on this from students of movement and dance,

1 My italics.

173

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA
who I found developed non-representational shapes more than
most beginners.

Never having done any modelling before, I first sensed a pleasure
in the feel of the clay as I squeezed and pressed and moulded it into
shapes with my whole hand. I was very conscious at first of the
shapes that I was forming having possibly a mental image of some
before translating them into material form. Gradually I became less
conscious of this and more fascinated by the feel of the material
resulting from a different touch a strong pressure of a smoothing
action, a quick prod or a rolling between the palms of the hands.

From this sensation, I think there evolved the feeling that I
wanted to make the model flowing, while not forming it from one
solid piece but knitting parts together in different ways and in
different directions. 1

Again,

I thought of making loops and feeling the shape of the holes
produced. This idea led me to make deep hollows and smoothing out
the surface I squeezed the edge of the hollow out as thin as possible. 8

As I began to model I worked consciously from the idea of move-
ment and tried to achieve lightness, but soon I realised that the
nature of the clay did not go towards lightness and I must accept its
heaviness and solidity. I had the idea of a figure kneeling on one
knee, and began to develop this idea, but very soon the shapes
formed by the clay, curves and hollows, became more important to
me than my idea and I worked rather to develop those. 3

Yet even when form is non-representational it is evocative.
Henry Moore has written: 4 'The meaning and significance of
form itself probably depends on the countless associations of
man's history. For example, rounded forms convey an idea of
fruitfulness, maturity, probably because the earth, woman's
breasts and most fruits are rounded, and these shapes are import-
ant because they have this background in our habits of perception.
. . There are universal shapes to which everyone is subcon-
sciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their con-
scious control does not shut them off.*

1 A woman Movement student. 2 A woman Movement student.

3 A woman Training College lecturer.

4 An Essay in The Painter's Object.

174

AND THE MEDIUM

One woman has written a simple but quite penetrating descrip-
tion of the emergence of forms.

I have frequently spoken about the clay and the model as if it
were something which took on a life apart from the modeller. Yet
this is only a way of speaking to convey the sense in which one's own
thoughts and feelings are made conscious to one through a medium.
I believe it is a mistake to imagine that something magical occurs
between the artist and his material. It appears like this only because
the unconscious of most of us is so far removed in everyday life
from the conscious. Certainly I was aware most of the time of the
origin of my forms in myself but not until they had become defined
far enough in the clay to recognise them. The ideas and conceptions
are one's own but they have to be reclaimed from the medium upon
which we have impressed them. There is, as it seems to me, no
mystique about creative art. It is one way of finding out about
oneself. 1

The most full accounts I have are from those I have known
well personally. A sensitive and penetrating teacher of poetry
alongside whom I had taken modelling groups suddenly wrote
me this letter.

Sunday.

I must write and tell you what happened to me. I was in London
last weekend and went just to look at the recreational groups.

I joined the modelling group and asked the leader for a lump of
clay. 2 I was blindfold for a minute or two and then knew more or
less that I was moulding a figure. So I took the scarf off and went on.
In about half-an-hour (which was all I had) the rough shape was
there. The teacher was very difficult about it I had leapt too many
of his stages but I couldn't wait, the thing was pouring out of me!
I had to leave it and go to the meeting and I thought that was that.
But all through the lecture on the secondary modern school this
piece of clay was at me. I wondered if they had destroyed it and rolled
it up I didn't wait for the discussion but just till the clapping
started and took the bus back to Highgate. They had saved it for me
and now I have finished it. It really is something most tremendously

1 A woman university lecturer. It will be apparent that I believe this
account underestimates the part played by the material, but it is helpful
to have such a clear account of one student's feelings.

2 This leader had worked with me and he also had found blindfolding
helpful with beginners. I do not mean to suggest that it is the general
practice or the right approach for all teachers, or all students.

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RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

important to me and I couldn't say, like some others, I know how
it's done because I don't. I'm going to save it for you to see and
some day to get your advice on firing it. Will it keep all right or do
they crack when they harden? It's a strange mixture of the symbolic
and the representational and it's strangely arresting.

But what I really want to say to you is what an experience it is,
and how now I know so much of all you have been saying about
clay. Now I know that I must go on. I never thought clay was my
medium but I had never tried modelling, and now I feel I must
go on and on.

Some time later this teacher had her second experience of clay
in a modelling group with me and wrote the following full
description. Photographs of her model at various stages are
attached.

AN ACCOUNT OF A CLAY MODEL IN THE MAKING

(Illus. 31)

Blindfold I took a large lump of clay and began to squeeze and press
it bang it and generally feel round and through it. Then the lump
divided in my hands. I began to mould it as a divided thing: An idea
of it sprang into my mind and I turned to S. R. and said, C I see it
already finished. It is an abstract shape two spirals then both
twisted into a third complicated spiral at the top.' The urge to take off
the scarf and mould what I was seeing in my mind's eye was very
strong. Very gently she persuaded me to go on a little longer blindfold.
Then slowly I felt human forms under my hands, and I knew certain
things about them:

1. That they had a common basic structure.

2. That one was gaining in size and stature above the other.

Again I desperately wanted to take off the scarfand again she
persuaded rne to go on a little longer. I went on moulding but now
I felt I was wrenching the clay the two figures seemed to be in some
kind of a struggle together and I was solving a problem with the
clay of how to keep them together making a group yet bringing
them apart to define a relationship. It was an awareness partly of the
clay as material, partly of an idea of what the clay was saying. The
two were there together. Then S. R. said if I wished I could take off
the scarf. I caught the suggestion from the form that one figure was
reclining, another was seated upright upon a large rock base.

Then I worked for some rime in a leisurely way developing a reclined

AND THE MEDIUM

female figure and an uptight male seated one facing each other. The
rock was built up and out partly to support the figures and partly to
vary and make more interesting the circular design which had deve-
loped. At this point I had to plunge my hands into the centre of the
model to dig out the clay that I did not want so that the figures could
gain their space field as it were. I discovered that in doing this I had
formed a pattern not unlike the original spiral idea, but flattened out
because it was a floor pattern. It was a kind of maze threading its way
round the limbs of the figures and the rock, but in the shape of a
broken circle joining together again.

I was aware of a struggle going on here inside myself an urge to
keep a circle with unbroken contacts an urge to break the circle and
lose some contacts. I found these two urges producing a struggle
inside me which often made decision very difficult. Then I wanted a
break caused by outside circumstances I tried to cause one by chatter-
ing or going over to some-one else working. It was as if I was saying
of the forms 'They must be joined up to keep the interest alive or
the continuity must be broken in order to keep it alive.' The problem
was how to recognise that breaking and joining were part of the same
drama. A similar problem emerged about the space in the middle of the
figure. It appeared menacing very often and I kept thinking: 'How
shall I bridge that gap which looks so ugly?' Then S. R. would say,
'When you have decided what the male figure is doing then probably
the problem of the space will be resolved.' This was true to some
extent but the space still remained a problem and the finished model
shows that I have not solved it satisfactorily. I can see that it is part
also of the problem of the broken and unbroken lines.

Then came the need to know more about the human figure I began
to look round the room and study the other people working in the
room the set of shoulders the crook of arms. At this point I asked
S. R. to pose for me. She lay on the table and floor sat on a chair and
so on. Placing herself as I wanted the figures in the model to be, she
got me to feel her bone structure and my own. Then I saw the im-
portance of bringing together the imaginative feeling of the forms and
a sense of the structure of the human body. But this landed me in
another conflict because one sense could so easily overcome the other
before a resolution had taken place. Either what I wanted to say got
lost in not being able to say it, or by concentrating too far upon the
anatomy I began to lose the impulse of what I wanted to say. It
seemed to me that if only these struggles between thought and feeling
and structure and design could be resolved then a very satisfactory
composition would result.

An example of this. There was a long uninteresting stretch on the

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RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

rock between the two figures. The man's arms had not been put on
but already the lean of the body suggested that one was resting on his
right knee and that the other, whatever it was doing, was held in a
restful position. The woman's arm reclining on the rock was reaching
out, but again in a non-urgent way.

The idea that this was a family group kept coming and going.
Finally I knew that there was a baby to be placed somewhere. If I
placed him on this dull patch on the rock there was the problem of
how he was to be connected with the father and mother. This was a
very difficult moment chiefly because I could not make the child
look anything but a tadpole from the waist downwards though the
head part and shoulders had come off quite well. I felt a kind of despair
which made me discredit everything else I had done. Then I appealed
to S. R. who with the smallest touch of clay just clapped the legs on
so that an alive and kicking baby was there in an instant. I could not
bring it to that point of space at that point of time. Once the baby
was there the mother's right arm knew what it was doing tickling one
of the baby's legs. Then came the strong urge for an unbroken circuit.
I would let the father's left arm lightly touch the child's head. But the
arm was not proportioned for the span it had to make to do this with
ease, and the hand kept breaking off. Moreover the long line of the
mother's arm, baby and the father's arm seem to need breaking; yet
if it was broken what was to happen to this left arm? Was the father
to seem quite uninterested in the child? I never solved this problem.
I am quite certain that it was solvable in this model and that the
breakdown which showed itself as a flagging interest, which I
rationalised in many ways, was something in me some effort I could
not make whilst the day was still soft and workable. My indecision
about continuities and discontinuities lasted too long for the model to
be rescued at that time. Just before I reached that breakdown point I
had thought I could work at the model for days then I knew that I
couldn't. In any case I was nearly at the end of what I wanted to say
or could at that time say. Artistically ithad failed but the reasons for
its failure were partly due to a failure to solve problems of line and
space but also a failure to solve problems in myself in relation to the
line and space of this model.

However, in one important respect the model had succeeded. It was
dimensional. At every turn of the group a new angle of meaning
unfolded. And one big change emerged. Looked at from one side
Mother and Father were talking to each other and attending to the
baby with a kind of loving subsidiary care. Their gaze is directed to
each other. On the other side of the model they are both turned to the
child. In the first position the child appears fully formed, enjoying a

178

AND THE MEDIUM

life of his own, in the second he merges into the rock face, as a shadowy
form. When this became apparent and was remarked upon by others
I knew that however much I had failed in many ways I had conveyed
the meaning that was developing as the work went on and which at
one point I stated quite consciously as my aim that I should convey
an idea about children and parents belonging to each other and yet
being apart. The idea which thus came to light in the end was there in
conception in the idea of the two spirals that met to make a third
spiral it was there in embryo in the idea of the two pieces of clay as
human figures which I was finding out how to group together and yet
to give a separate entity to. This notion of togetherness and apartness
was there then in all stages of the model and expressed itself in one
struggle after another through changing forms until it culminated in
a family group where a sense of confirmed domesticity and tender
concern was linked with the suggestion of conflict expressed in the
nobbly forms of the rock and the complex interweaving of bodies and
limbs. It would be easy to imagine a sea washing up around. I wonder
how far the tellingness of a composition can be judged by its power to
call forth many interpretations but at the same time to resist them and
subdue comment to its own intention.

Another thing which this work brings home to me convincingly is
that the problem of what is often called technique is this problem of
understanding human feelings in terms of a medium. Once the facts
about a medium are known e.g. the porous quality of clay then the
problem is how to say all one wants to say within these terms. I believe
there is a great deal of truth in Robert Frost's remark that a poet has
nothing to think about but the subject and afterwards nothing to boast
about but the form. His intention is truly to think and feel through his
material, then the form will bear witness to his success or his failure.

Working this way has also brought home to me the force of Keats*
utterance: C I am convinced of nothing but the holiness of the heart's
affections and the truth of imagination.'

It seems rather presumptuous to comment on an experience
which is described with such honesty and insight by the modeller
herself. But it is perhaps worth pointing out how the first forms
which emerged were, as so often, pillar shapes drawn up from the
body of the clay itself and a hollow form later deepened by the
writer plunging her hands into the centre to dig the model out.
The symbolic nature of the activity is clearly brought out on
many levels; the writer describes it in terms of space, 'the urge
to break the circle and lose some of the contacts', and in terms

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RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

of human relationships these two shapes had already taken on
characteristics of male and female. As she says, 'Breaking and
joining were part of the same drama.'

The problems of art education are summed up admirably in
her comment

then I saw the need for bringing together the imaginative feeling of
the forms and a sense of the structure of the human body. , . . Either
what I wanted to say got lost in not being able to say it or by
concentrating too far on the anatomy I began to lose the impulse of
what I wanted to say.

Clay is an extremely valuable material just because it can be
reshaped in a moment as ideas develop or feelings become clear
in one model. 1 This writer says frankly, 'However much I had
failed in other ways I had conveyed the meaning that was developing
as the work went otf (my italics).

Some teachers today are anxious lest the current use of drawings
and models by the psychiatrists, and perhaps even that kind of
humanist relationship of art education to the life of the individual
which I have tried to describe, should result in the values of art
itself being held of no account. But to convey not only to express
one's feelings demands just those absolutes of tension and balance
between variety and the harmony of the whole, or between light
and shade in many senses, which are the underlying concepts
through which the artist's thought is conveyed. This particular
model was an early effort by one skilled in the discipline of words
rather than clay, the next model to>be described goes further as a
work of art.

After taking a few days of modelling with this adult group at a
summer conference, I told the students that if any of them wished
after they left the conference to write down their impressions of
our sessions together I would be very glad. Among others, I
received this from a woman painter and training college lecturer,
the only person in the group trained in art.

MODELLING BLINDFOLD
(Illus. 32)

I had heard vaguely of modelling blindfold, and was faintly sceptical,
and inclined to think of it as just another 'stunt' teaching method. I
1 For the same reason it can be a dangerous one.
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AND THE MEDIUM

was therefore surprised at the completeness with which it shut out my
usual world even though I paint a little I'd not realised how narrowly
my reactions were limited to the visual. I had also worked a bit in
clay before, but again was surprised how much having to rely on touch
made its character evident and pleasurable a revelling in the feel of it,
and a sort of responsibility and tenderness towards it. 1 thought, this
is what I feel for Hugh (my seven-year-old nephew) and I found my
hands making a curved and sheltering shape, and I was not much
surprised when I saw what I'd made.

Now we had lovely new silky clay with an elasticity of its own. I got
a nice large lump and blindfolded myself in a kind of glad surrender
and started to work the clay and was at once struck, no, there came to
my consciousness a feel of the tension in the clay and how, as I pulled
it left and right with my two hands, it was opposing and yet indis-
solubly one like love (and I had a sort of flashback to a student who was
modelling last term the heads and shoulders of two boxers, and how
I said to her, 'Your problem is to make them separate and opponents,
and yet united in one.') The two pieces of clay in my two hands were
a man and a woman, both drawn apart but returning each to the other
and the main forms were modelled fairly distinctly before I took my
blindfold off. I remember being surprised that I'd made the man so
large, but otherwise it was pretty much as I'd expected.

I worked open-eyed the rest of Saturday and Sunday morning. Main
parts of figures were very little altered I was awfully pleased with it
and felt it had expressed a bit of me, and was ridiculously pleased that
people liked it. I didn't know what to do with the arms, especially
the man's left arm which led away rather indeterminately. S. R. said,
'Would you try a clean cut with the wire and see perhaps if it wants to
go in this direction?' So I cut it with the wire and saw at once that
thereby the feeling was returned into the model. I don't know whether
she or I said her hand might need to be turned in too, and it was so.

Later, considering their faces I began to model them in a too obvious
way, relying on accidents of light and shade rather than on the actual
form of eyes, etc. But as soon as it was suggested to me this was
happening I saw it and rescued it. Also with the arms and hands, I
began to make them too anatomical and too strongly disengaged, but
clay is lovely you can have second feelings and this was put right.
People said very nice things about it and I lapped that up, but as well
as this I felt a great deep satisfaction, and even now (a month later) the
model sits on my mantelpiece and I love it ridiculously dearly.

On Monday morning I was to start something new. We'd been at
Bosham on Sunday and I had been much moved as always by that
lovely place, by the sense of ambient, pervasive light, the quiet, the feel

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RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

of its being old, and I thought, oh, I could paint this. And then I
watched the swans sailing so serenely, one especially, the large rounded
form of her breast pushing gently into the water and making little
shallowed hollowed ripples, but so much did they belong to each other
that one hardly knew which caused which. I said I had an idea I wanted
to try, though I felt very doubtful about it and was pretty sure it might
fail, and we agreed I'd try. I knew that 'in my right mind' I'd never
try a swan the idea is too obvious and overblown and sentimentalised
and I'd have discouraged a student from attempting it and I knew all
this but one part of me strongly wanted to try. I didn't work on it
for very long and when I looked it was horrible, quite horrible, and
I knew I couldn't do it and squashed it sadly. (Now, a month later, I
just wonder, I just wonder if I could have satisfied myself by an abstract
of the shapes, or better, by dancing it out; or whether it wasn't really
a formal idea at all but a kind of day residue, and I wonder why I
clung so desperately to an idea that I knew deep down wouldn't work.
Learnt a lot about teacher-pupil relationship, S. R/s gentle acceptance
both of the desire and the failure.)

Then I was a bit sad and lost, and she suggested that I should try
a blindfold model of a head with the face turned away from me. I
began and quite soon felt happy with the clay and the head began to
grow and I felt my own head and tried to get the right relationship of
parts. It was difficult, but I can't remember much about its coming or
what I thought. In fact, I didn't really think very much about who it
was, and when I unblindfolded, it was quite a complete head, though
rough, and I didn't know she was like that. (Someone said after that it
was rather like me, but I can't see it.)

I worked on it same thing over, making the eyes too photographic
(funny to do this not in paint), but rescued quickly. I didn't know
what to do about the back of her head and her hair. I tried long locks
over her shoulders to emphasise the peasant-primitive feel of her, and
then someone mentioned the horsetail, and I got a lump of clay and
stuck it on very roughly to get the effect and it just seemed to balance
happily and to be right and give the youthful inexperienced yet wise
(? slight feel of ancient Greek) feel of her. She's now a bit like a
fifteenth-century Italian painting I must look up the one I mean.
And we had to stop and she's sitting patiently in a biscuit tin in the
kitchen waiting for me.

These two modellers give us valuable insight into the relation-
ships between three things: the qualities of this material which
results in its 'naturally* assuming certain shapes; the thoughts or

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AND THE MEDIUM

ideas that arise in the mind of a particular person; the forms that
are actually found possible to a disciplined control of the medium,
which arise from the other two. Both these students found or were
seized by a theme the human family so rich in itself that in
interplay with the clay, it soon involved them in philosophic
musings. 'There came to my conciousness a feel of the tension
in the clay, and how as I pulled it left or right with my two hands,
it was opposing and yet indissolubly one, like love/ The other
modeller finds herself quoting Robert Frost and Keats. For her,
only the words of a poet can describe her experience, and it in turn
illuminates her understanding of Keats.

Anything whatsoever may serve as an inspiration for the artist,
and the most unlikely object may be illuminated by his personal
vision. But it is no accident that from the earliest times and still
today, artists sculptors such as Moore and Giacometti, poets,
dramatists and even unusually responsive architects continue to
find repeated inspiration in this and other universal themes.
They are the basic stuff of our lives, and in shaping our statement
about them however individual we are in some sense one with
the artists who have done so and with all men.

When Margaret made her 'rosegarden' with its walls and
narrow entrance, its fountains, rose-trees and c lovely smells* which
she described in that dreamy haze, she was unconsciously aligning
herself with the long tradition of the 'idealised garden' of our
culture. When she put a labyrinth round it she protected it by the
ancient symbol of conditional entry.

I am not losing sight of the fact that all Margaret actually pro-
duced in that art lesson were some sausages and pillars of clay on
the desk. Her idea or theme, while it had the basic formal structure
of the traditional garden, was yet not worked out to the extent that
could communicate to others, though acceptance seemed to satisfy
her and send her off gaily to her next lesson. Obviously there is
a temperamental difference here some people are more easily
satisfied as well as a difference in stage of ability to express
thoughts and feelings in that medium. I think the mood gives us
the clue as to how, as teachers, we may discern the point each has
reached.

I believe that the mood of immersion which I noticed also when
I too rudely interrupted Bert modelling his miner, and which had
to be dispelled in the gtoup returning from the coal-mine, is

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

usually the stage of not having worked through to a resolution,
a statement (to oneself or others) which communicates the ex-
perience. Margaret did not come to me nor draw my attention to
her 'rosegarden'; it was the end of the lesson which brought
a termination to her musings. This contrasts with the sense of
relief and satisfaction shown by the painters of so many of the cave
paintings and the two adult modellers who modelled a family. It
is not a question of achieving a real work of art few of us ever
do that but of having found an expression fitting to our com-
mand of the medium at the moment. The girl who modelled the
'ancient Mother-Goddess' ran up to me to share her pleasure in it.

Even though that model communicated hardly more than the
rosegarden, she showed very clearly that she felt a sense of release
and joy in having made it. Eddie, who said Tve done it' before he
broke up his woman, had a further kind of satisfaction. The
students who, on the day after we returned from the coal-mine,
went away and painted, modelled or danced their experience, were
able later that evening to meet and talk quietly and more objec-
tively about it, showing that they had reached a new position
through their creative work.

There are therefore two different levels of release and satis-
faction. The primary, and educationally the more important, is the
shaping of a form which draws the experience into a state, into a
'gestalt' which makes it acceptable, digestible to that person. Other-
wise experience is simply chaos and we are confused and over-
whelmed, never coming to that point of rest and stability. Young
children can manipulate shapes and colours earlier than language,
and so paint and clay and other materials are vitally necessary for
them to have always to hand. 1 This shaping, which defines a form
and which both releases the maker from the chaos of unresolved
experiences and nourishes his nature through the now digestible
material, can do this even when he does not realise consciously
what he has made as the little girl did not know the form which
pleased her so much resembled a mother-goddess, and as few of
us are fully aware of the implications of what we have made. It
mediates between the different levels of the maker. It goes on being

1 Even later, when more command of language is gained, there are still
many experiences which cannot be communicated in verbal language and
feelings can be communicated much more directly and precisely in shapes and
colours and sounds,

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AND THE MEDIUM

necessary, after communication with others is well established,
for secret and personal experiences which do not call for immedi-
ate sharing. Communication brings the second level of release.

But communication to others is a different matter that de-
pends not only on sufficient command of the chosen medium to
shape it but also on the other's ability to interpret. Just as the
history of art for four hundred years shows repeatedly a rejection
of what proved to be valid for a later generation, so the history
of art teaching, in spite of sincere goodwill, had been too often a
rejection of the children's communications to us. One who tries
to communicate is dependent on a certain responsiveness in his
recipient. Having said that, I still believe that helping each indi-
vidual towards his own language of communication is a great
part of the art teacher's job. Between the phantasy ramblings of
childhood and the wrought steel of poetry, between some of these
strange clay shapes illustrated here and the formal precision of
sculpture, lies not only the pain of maturity but the discipline of
the art. To have the emotions and the desire to express is not
enough. Marion Milner 1 has written of another little girl of eleven
who made a mess of her consulting room out of sheer affection.

She was trying to deny the discrepancy between the feeling and the
expression of it; by denying completely my right to protect any of
my property from defacement she was even trying to win rne over
to her original belief that when she gave her messes lovingly they
were literally as lovely as the feelings she had in the giving of them.
In terms of the theory of symbolism, she was struggling with the
problem of the identity of the symbol and the thing symbolised. But
was this struggle to make me see as she saw, any different from the
artist's struggle to communicate his private vision? [The battle over
communicating] the private vision, when the battleground is the
evaluation of body products, has a peculiar poignancy. In challenging
the accepted view and claiming the right to make others share their
vision, there is a danger which is perhaps the sticking point in the
development of many who would otherwise be creative people. For
to win this battle, when fought on this field, would mean to seduce
the world to madness, to denial of the difference between cleanliness
and dirt, organisation and chaos. Thus in one sense the battle is a
very practical one; it is over what is suitable and convenient stuff

1 M. Milner in an article on 'Symbol-Formation', in New Directions m
'Psycho-analysis^ 1952.

R.L. O 185

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE IDEA

for symbols to be made of; but at the same time it is over the painful
recognition that, if the lovely stuff is to convey lovely feelings, there
must be a lot of hard work done on the material.

Crazy Jane, Yeats' female tramp, playing the part of the wise
fool who, as in Shakespeare, mocks our pride, our self-righteous-
ness, our intellectual solutions, and who is more than ever neces-
sary in an age of cellophane-wrapped specialisms, reminds us

c Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul' I cried.

*A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.* l

Echoing Stanley Spencer's 'spiritual union between what in me
has been revealed and what outside jnyself revealed it', Wilson
Knight has written, 2 C A11 poetry celebrates a divine creation by
marriage of humanity and nature'. But the visual arts, and
especially perhaps pottery, sculpture and architecture, celebrate
this in an inescapable way; the raw material is the stuff of the
earth which must be rent if it is to be impregnated by human
ideas, and the human partner receives as well as implants in that
reciprocal rhythm.

For Margaret, the path may lie through the discipline of pottery

1 W. B. Yeats, Crasg Jane Talks with the Bishop.

It is not, I think, that we must take the fool as the ideal to follow, to set
up as a model for us all, but that we must never despise and underestimate
his wisdom, nor cease to be grateful that some are called to be fools, to live
out their intuitions about the nature of life in these extreme ways. We have
enough sane, calculating, compromising mentors, and, if we do not have the
living advocates of the other ultimate (the rebels, the earthy, who enjoy
instead of trying to turn their backs on our physical nature) as a counter-
force, how shall we each find our own point of balance on that tight-rope,
a liveable philosophy?

Nor should we forget that the material which was used for Margaret's
'rosegarden' and Eddie's Voman* is the material of Sung pottery. More-
over, without the physical labour of stamping clay and getting smoke in
one's eyes and dirt in one's hair stoking the kiln, Sung pottery could not
have been produced.

2 G. Wilson Knight, The Christian Renaissance, MacMillan, Toronto, 1933.

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AND THE MEDIUM

and the study of the garden theme in our culture. No adult, how-
ever much one wished to, can bring her fulfilment, but it is per-
haps possible to show her what real fulfilment is, and to set before
her to offset the tawdry which she will meet in cheap adolescent
literature the different paths to fulfilment, of Isolde, of Dido, of
Hermione, of Beatrice.

If then there are moments to urge a student to disciplined study,
moments to draw his attention to the works of the masters and
other moments to leave him alone with his own creating, how are
we to avoid doing the wrong thing? We can only prepare our-
selves to recognise these 'moments of creation' by an observation
of moods and a sensitive awareness to atmosphere; by using in
humility our own experience-as-an-artist to relate to his.

CHAPTER TWELVE
ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

*The Rose in a mystery* where is it found?

Is anything true? Does it grow upon ground?

It was made from earth's mould, but it went from men's eyes,

And its place is a secret. . . .

G. M. HOPKINS

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form,

The Dry Salvages, T. s. ELIOT

THE Cretan labyrinth-design,, it will be remembered, has no
blind alleys. Every part of the figure has meaning, and even
when a path is apparently going in the wrong direction, it
leads to the centre. 1 The labyrinth, a widely used form for
initiation, may certainly symbolise education, for it is the type
figure of conditional entry. He who traces its path aright wins
through. I had been puzzled for a time by the fact that there
seemed to be two main types of labyrinth, those in which one had
to reach the centre (the Cretan maze, carried by bronze age settlers
across Europe) and the labyrinth in which one had to find one's
way through, (the Malekulean mazes through which a man found
his way beyond death). For us Europeans, the labyrinth is
indissolubly associated with Crete. Now Daedalus was a Cretan,
and Daedalus gives us the clue to this puzzle as Ariadne gave
Theseus her clew to his. When on their flight from the angry
Minos, Icarus' wings of wax melted and he fell into the sea,
Daedalus bereaved, landed in Sicily, and afterwards built that
temple with the Cumaean gates where, Virgil tells us, Aeneas
descended to the Underworld for illumination and guidance. But

1 Perhaps it is a matter of temperament whether one sees this or the
'closed* Kafka labyrinth as a symbol of life itself.

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ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

Minos wished to pursue his vengeance, and knowing the intricate
jrnind of Daedalus (as well he might who had lost his wife to a bull
through Daedalus' artifact 1 ) he offered a reward to whoever would
pass a linen thread through a Triton shell. Though in hiding,
Daedalus could not resist the challenge. 'Fastening a gossamer
thread to an ant, he bored a hole at the point of the shell and lured
the ant up the spirals by smearing honey on the edges of the hole.
Then he tied the linen thread to the gossamer and drew that through
as well/ 2 Then Cocalus, the Sicilian king with whom he was
hiding, produced the problem solved, claiming the reward. Minos,
assured that he had found Daedalus' hiding place, demanded his
surrender but Daedalus finally outwitted him. So, when seen in
three dimensions, the spiral of the labyrinth can lead to the centre
(honey on the hole!) and at the same time lead out at the other end
Yeats' 'perne in a gyre'.

The labyrinth has served as an apt image of life's confusions.
Dante, at the springing point of European poetry, has described
his journey, which was certainly tortuous, starting from the Dark
Wood, to

That valley's wandering maze

Whose dread had pierced me to the heart root deep. 3

He goes by way of that wilderness echoed in Blake's

The wild desert planted o'er
with labyrinths of wayward love
Where roam the lion, wolf and boar. 4

This is the closed labyrinth from which there is no way out
the hell of endless repetition of forbidden indulgence. Dante
descends with, for a guide, Virgil, who described for us that
labyrinth wrought on the gates to the Underworld by Daedalus
and he goes into the womb of earth herself the traditional place
for initiation and illumination. As Dante searched in the coils of
the Inferno, and on the slopes of Mount Purgatory, so Donne
pictured the search for enlightenment

1 1 am aware that there are other constructions that can be put upon this
strange story.

2 Robert Graves, Greek Myths, vol. I.

3 Dante, Inferno, trans. Dorothy sayers.
* W. Blake, The Mental Traveller.

189

ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

On a huge hill,

dragged and steep Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about and about must goe; 1

In our own day the Four Quartets use constantly the language
of labyrinths

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future. . . .

The way up is the way down,

the way forward is the way back. 2

And the whole spiritual journey of the poet is summed up in a
slow revelation of the labyrinth nature of life.

In order to arrive there

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not. 3

In Ash Wednesday the apparently closed labyrinth, the 'endless
journey to no end', is seen to have a centre, a heart in Grace,
personified in Mary, rose hortus conclusus and conclusion, Christian
inheritrix of many of the Great Mother's attributes:

The single rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of a]! that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word

1 J. Donne, Satyr III. a T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages.

3 T. S. Eliot, East Coker.

190

ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends. 1

The search which this book describes began with a young girFs
putting a labyrinth round a rosegarden. Now the rosegarden has
long been the symbol of fulfilment. Aucassin, the poet king
James I of Scotland, the hero of the Romaunt de la Rose and count-
less others first saw their life's love in a rosegarden. In a rose-
garden, according to tradition, the Perisan lovers sway in each
others' arms. A rosegarden often surrounds a castle or a keep
where the loved one is held (though Henry II chose to keep his
love at the centre of a maze!). Mary, who is Rosa Mundi herself, is
also e the enclosed garden', and the rosegarden and the paradise
garden finally fuse in one symbol of joyous fulfilment; so I began
to understand something of the antiquity of the images in "Four
Quartets., from the first exploration of past experience, 'disturbing
the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves' and the echo

down the passage that we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Eliot's garden too has the traditional elements of the formal
pattern, the alley, the pool filled with water, the birds calling in
response to the music in the shrubbery.

Only in time can the moment in the rosegarden
Be remembered.

The interaction of the timeless moment with time's moment of
remembrance is in a rosegarden itself a timeless symbol, but
a fragile one, for what fades more quickly or reverts to weeds more
wholly when left untended? It is man's courageous and pathetic
effort to enclose the experience of romantic love, to isolate and
intensify it through the delight of the senses enriched by every
refinement of cultured humanity, so that in this love we are not
only ourselves but the inheritors of and trustees for all great
lovers. Nor must we narrow the concept of love to a complacent
heterosexuality, remembering Sappho, Leicester and the central
image of Family Reunion contained in the line

1 T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday,
191

ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

And I ran to meet you in the rosegarden. 1

The garden image, which enshrined this profound concept of
ideal fulfilment in European culture, also contains that which
reminds us of mortality the yew tree, which came into the gar-
den by way of the 'gardens of death* of the ancients.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. 2

The other gardens of death were the gardens of Adonis,
baskets or pots of swift-germinating herbs tended by the women
of Egypt and Syria, and when they as swiftly withered, con-
signed to the river to be carried away while they sobbed and
mourned for the dead youth, lamenting his death and singing of
his resurrection. 3

Moreover, the zenith moment of love in the garden is juxta-
posed not only to the moment of mortal death, but, in another
dimension, to human suffering, the fire which burns up the
desert.

I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars. 4

But divine suffering, as Pentecostal fire, illumines inwardly but
consumes not echoing the crown of roses and crown of thorns:
the saints 'standing in God's holy fire* glow like the gods in
Persian miniatures, blaze like the burning bush. We are allowed
to glimpse the true moment of fulfilment when

the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one. 5

Thus, as I understand it, the desert, the symbolic opposite of our
garden, is one of three things: it is the uncultivated barren place
which has yet to be tended and cared for ('the desert shall blossom
like the rose'); it is the state of a formerly flourishing land which

1 T. S. Eliot, Family Reunion. 2 T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

3 Jessie Weston gives one of the many accounts of this in From Ritual to
Romance, Doubleday Anchor Books.

4 T. S. Eliot, East Coker. T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

192

ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

has been blighted by plague or fire, ( c the Waste Land'); and it is
also the symbol of renunciation ( c the saints in the desert').

Education as I see it should itself be a fulfilment of human
aspirations at different stages of development: the physical co-
ordination and pride of skills; the training of intelligence and the
discovery of intellectual satisfactions; the directing and strengthen-
ing of the emotional life and the anticipation of romantic love. It
should also be a preparation for the later fulfilments of adult life
unknown to adolescence. But it should not ignore the renunciations
that every life calls for, stressing rather the quality of that which
is worth sacrifice, and the possibility of a final synthesis, c for the
fire and the rose are one'.

Great poems of 'almost eternal durability', fine buildings in
which man encompasses space to house his spirit, even a simple
pot implying the still centre round which movement eternally
spirals all these embody the great symbols which carry their
meaning for every level of the personality as to every age of child-
hood or manhood. These are for us, as teachers, paths which lead
out to the profound achievements of other ages and back into the
deeper recesses of ourselves. But they are also because they do
not rely on intellectual comprehension alone meeting grounds
where we find ourselves alongside our pupils as persons involved
in life's problems. Contemplating together such archetypal
symbols we meet simply as human beings, sometimes finding our
roles reversed as Margaret led me (tracing with her finger the
path into her 'rosegarden', c You have to come along this way')
and as her model led me into this study. Although I tumbled on
them 'by accident', the rosegarden and labyrinth seem to me,
among others, pecularily illuminating symbols of adolescence. We
would be sentimental to see that phase of life only as the first, and
cynical to see it only as the second, but the double image reflects
the yearning for real fulfilment hedged about with the difficulties
and renunciations of growing up.

Such symbols, which are strange to us 'yet we have known them
always', are our common ground. In making our own image of
them, the isolation (which might result from the development and
definition of each personality for which I have pleaded) is averted
in the consummation of the individual and the family into
the whole human race seen in the light of eternity Dante's
Royal Rose in which he saw the whole scattered leaves of the

193

ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

universe bound up into one folio or one flower turning towards
the Light.

Pursuing the study of the labyrinth which a young girl put
round her rosegarden led to Eleusis, and in the Eleusinian
Mysteries the individual's consummation is revealed.

The idea of the original Mother-Daughter goddess (Demeter-
Persephone), at root a single entity, is at the same time the idea of
re-birth. . . . The principal thing in Eleusis was birth as a more
than individual phenomenon, through which the individual's mor-
tality was perpetually counterbalanced, death suspended, and the
continuance of living assured. . . . The ear of corn in Eleusis sums
up a certain aspect of the world, the Demetrian aspect . . . budlike
summings-up and goddesses (of Spring, of Harvest earth and of
Death) in all their perfection form a single, unequivocal, coherent
group. Through all of them, through the ear of corn and the Mother-
Daughter goddess, the same vision opens. Every grain of corn and
every maiden contains, as it were, all its descendants an infinite
series of mothers and daughters in one. . . . What we see in Eleusis
not, however, broken up in this way but summed up in clear
figures is something uniform and quite definite: the infinity of
supra-individual organic life.

The Eleusinians experienced a more than individual fate, the fate
of organic life in general, as their own fate. ... In this wordless
knowing and being the first two elements of this paradox having
a supra-individual fate as one's one fate, and all being as one's own
being are not really contradictory. As organic beings we do in
fact possess both. 1

EHot put it another way:

past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generationsnot forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable: 2

I have been pleading for a kind of teaching of the arts which
presents a worthy material both in the sense of the physical
medium and of the stimulus presented to the pupils, for we have
seen how one interacts with the other and constantly links it to
profound work of the past which draws on the same sources. This
is not, let me say again, the only aspect of teaching necessary, but

1 Jung and Kerenyi, Introduction to A Science of Mythology, p. 211.

2 T. S. Eliot, Ihe Dry Salvages.

194

ROSEGARDEN AND LABYRINTH

itis that in which we may hope for complete personal involvement,
that leap into the sea' of Keats, that immersion in the aesthetic
moment of Berenson, from which we emerge renewed, even
re-born.

The moments of contemplation and the moments of creation
fertilise one another. We must give every single person the
opportunity to be themselves, at the zenith of themselves, which
is the experience of the artist

As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
. . . my self \t speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me; for that I came.' 1

In such moments the intellectual awareness (though intellect is not
uppermost), the bodily co-ordination (free from self-conscious-
ness of body), the intense aliveness of heightened emotion, are
apprehended as an exquisite sensation of wholeness. Any child who
has known such a moment, in however limited a sense, shares
with the artist the knowledge that experience is not just something
that happens to you. It is something you take perhaps literally
in your hands and shape it; and the shape you make stands out
there in the world and stares back at you, shaming or delighting
you, or challenging you to shape it better. Then it may come home
that art is a way of extending and coming to terms with experience
itself. Long after he has left school and probably left painting and
the writing of poetry behind him, one who has known this will
look at the work of an artist or a poet, and, with this under-
standing built into his being by experience, recognise the image
another human being has made of tragedy or of ecstasy. Then he
will know with certainty that no man is an island: that for us the
bell does not only toll, but we can also share in the peal for a
wedding, or a birth, or a rebirth.

1 Gerard Manley Hopkins.

195

APPENDIX I
PHYLLIS'S PROGRESS

A BRIEF account of the course of one adolescent over the two
years I knew her may make the progress I intend clearer. Phyllis,
twelve years old when I met her, was a rather pale, plump,
cockney lass of mediocre intelligence, who obviously got pleasure
from paint splashing and had a sense of colour and a natural gift
for getting down quick impressions. Her paintings, or rather
sketches, were always of people, either rapidly roughed in with
charcoal or painted directly in quick strokes, never finished off
but laid aside as soon as a problem presented itself. While the
individual figures have life and are related in groups to one
another, they are not related to the background usually just left
as grey paper and the light and dark tones are used in a pleasant
conjunction but not with any idea of representing solid form or
light and shade.

At this time Phyllis went with her class teacher to visit the Tate
Gallery. Out of all the near-contemporary paintings which she
saw there she fastened on Cezanne and could not leave his paint-
ings once she had seen them. Who would have guessed that
Phyllis, so lazy, slap-dash, easy-going as she was, would have
found her 'master' in Cezanne, one of the most precise and
persevering of all the modern masters? The aspect of Cezanne's
work which fascinated her was the way in which he represented
three-dimensional form by changes of colour so that one sees the
curved plane swinging away round a limb or a tree by the vari-
ation in colour rather than by tone, as had been the practice with
most of the post-Renaissance painters. Now Phyllis was a girl of
limited intelligence and very little experience of art, and she
grasped only this one facet of the complex art of Cezanne but
this fascinated her.

In the first art lesson after this visit she set up for herself in
the art room as these children were accustomed to do if they

196

PHYLLIS'S PROGRESS

wished a group of oranges on a plate. In painting the oranges she
tried to show the shape of the sphere by varying the colour and she
put it on with careful dabbing strokes. She did this with con-
centration. To persist in this over the whole painting was more
than she was capable of, and (Illus. 32) the dish and table cover
are treated more in her former style and the background is filled
with a rather facile decoration. But she bad (tiled in the background
and covered the whole sheet, which she had not done up till this
time.

When the class did the Family Group subject., Phyllis chose to
work with them. In this painting she reverted to her former style
of a quick brush sketch, but she again used the whole paper and
composed the picture pleasantly within the space. The rug in the
foreground shows similar decorative pattern as in her former
work, but there is no attempt here at representing three-dimen-
sional form. Was the subject too complex for her, or too near her
emotionally? It is as though she, like some painters, must work
out her technical problems in a restricted area such as the still-life,
which narrows down the problem to a relatively simple set of
shapes. In the next study, however, she herself chose the subject,
a group of nudes, and here she further explored her technique for
representing plastic form by changes of colour. In fact, in her
excitement, she has exaggerated this; the colour ranges from a
very pale pink through a deeper sweety pink, to a strong rasp-
berry, but she has been fairly consistent in using this gradation on
the different curves of the women sitting on the grass. The draw-
ing is weak and the whole is rough and unfinished, but that is
quite what one might expect.

In Phyllis' next picture a street scene the technique as
developed in the nudes is used not only for the standing figures
but in the trees, and the whole painting is carefully composed
within the picture space. True, the houses are rather flat, but she
has made strides in maintaining a coherent style over the whole.
She is beginning to use consistently the language she has chosen.

The next significant picture of Phyllis is called *An Eastern
Princess* and the head and neck of the princess fill the whole
sheet. It is a completely blatant and luscious female with enor-
mously enlarged black eye-lashes and a huge red sensual mouth.
The ear-rings are much larger than was the fashion at the time
when this was painted and the princess wears a great assortment

APPENDIX I

of elaborated jewellery on her elongated neck. Her colouring is
south-sea brown and her jet black hair is piled on her head.
Phyllis worked rapidly on this painting. It is interesting that it
shows none of the technical achievement that she had reached in
the last studies of three-dimensional form. The face is painted
almost flat in a return to her earlier decorative style. Obviously
her mind was feed at this moment, not on technique, but on
something explosive inside her which must be said. This was con-
firmed when she showed it to me, saying in a manner both cheeky
and defensive, T>o you think it is like me, Miss?' Now Phyllis had
a pleasant neck, but her face was rather pasty white and her hair
was a mousey colour. The long black eye-lashes and the great red
mouth could not have been further from any potential good looks
she had. One can't build on a complete unreality. By this time I
felt that I knew Phyllis well enough to treat her frankly, and I
said, 'No, Phyllis, I don't think it is very like you. The princess
has your neck, and it's a very nice neck; some time you must
choose a blouse to show it off, but your hair and your skin are fair
and I like the way your hair falls simply and straight round your
head. For you to wear such enormous earrings would pull people's
eyes away from the way your nose wrinkles up when you are
pleased. Your eyes are grey and grey eyes can be most attractive
because they reflect the colours that you are wearing and they
change colour in different lights and different moods.' We looked
again at the princess, Phyllis perhaps a little crestfallen, and then I
laughed and shook my head, 'No, Phyllis, it's not like you, it's fun,
it's exciting, it's exotic, but I like you better.'

After this Phyllis worked on three studies for self-portraits,
using a mirror. One of those was in charcoal, one in oil paint and
one in powder colour. By observing her own face in the mirror,
and drawing directly from that, she did arrive at something like
a self-portrait. True, it is still idealised; the neck is elongated and
the face is moulded into an oval shape, but the colouring, although
the hair is more yellow than Phyllis 5 mousey colouring, is fair and
natural. There is no attempt to dress it up in an elaborate style and
no attempt to add those exaggerated, flapping eyelashes. Phyllis
worked with great concentration, as the fact of three self-portraits,
almost identical, bear witness, and the final study on greenish
paper in those soft yellows and fawns is a lovely piece of work.

The last picture which I have of Phyllis' is called 'The Wise

198

PHYLLIS'S PROGRESS

Old Man of the East'. The Orient is again her source of inspira-
tion; here is the brown skin which she used in the c Eastern
Princess' and dark eyes which look out from a hollow face. But it
is a thoughtful, contemplative painting rather than an idealised
one. The wise old man is wearing a yellow garment, with em-
broidery on the front, showing her love of pattern (which was apt
to overrun the earlier pictures) but here limited to the tunic in
unusual colours of blue and petunia on the gold. The whole
picture is thoughtfully composed within the picture space and the
background subtly related to the coffee-brown of his face, dark
hair and yellow robe. When I asked Phyllis what had made her
paint this subject, she looked at me almost shyly and said,
Tve been reading a book about Buddhism and the wisdom of the
East/ I was not able to pursue the subject at that moment, for all
I know it may have been a romantic novel or an astrologer's c hand-
book', but I felt that in this picture Phyllis had achieved a real
moment of vision, a moment of wholeness, in which she had
brought together so many elements which had been disparate in
her former work. She had modified her exotic idea of the East
shown in the "Eastern Princess' to something a little more genuine;
she had related subtle colours and resisted the temptation to use
wild, hot contrasts to achieve an exaggerated effect; she had
restrained the decoration to a place where it contributed to the
whole theme; and she had caught within the face of the wise old
man himself something which was gentle and genuine, in an
appreciation, not of blatant, physical charms but of frail old age.

Phyllis enjoyed art, but as she left school near this time I have
no idea whether she went on with her painting or not. Yet look-
ing back from the first slap-dash, uncomposed, unfinished paint-
ings to the last group, I am sure that it mirrors her advance
towards a coherent personality in coming to terms with her own
appearance which is such an important facet of the adolescence
of girls and in her yearning for something a little wider than her
limited London East End life. 'Mirrored' is not adequate because
I hope that the paintings themselves were experiences which
contributed to this development.

The figure of a spiral with its oscillation and wheeling suggests
how such progress is far from being in a straight line. Phyllis,
using paint to express her ideas about the world and her phan-
tasies about herself growing up, is seen to find a course which

APPENDIX I

pulls out on one side to work out a technique of painting (in-
spited by Cezanne) and on the other to her interest in people
linked to her own romantic longings.

No diagrammatic image is adequate for the complex operations
of human development but this spiral may at least remind us how
neither the 'purely objective' study of an object or a technique,
nor mere subjective self-expression can be a final aim for our
students. Such works are only halting places (if they become more
one gets held there immobile) from which one wheels back, and
perhaps occasionally, like Phyllis with her 'Wise Old Man', I feel,
achieves a work which unifies these extremes and gives a point of
equilibrium.

Objective studies have not formed any part of this book be-
cause they are not its subject, but, as a teacher, I must confess that
there are children who, during the years I have known them, have
been deflected from their own way of painting, neither by the

Sketch of people Farnjy group Street scene Eastemjrincess Wiseold man

Oranges Nudes Studies in Three self-

classroom portraits

works of the masters with which I have carefully littered their
environment, nor by the direct visual experiences to which I have
tried to entice them in observed studies. They have pursued their
own way self-motivated, sometimes not improving their power of
visual representation one whit, but unerringly creating their own
world of images. Such a one was Bobby skinny pale child of
slum patents winning his way through school, not by charm or
fisticuffs, but by avoiding the occasion of conflict, and smilingly
producing each week a halcyon world out of his humdrum
experiences. One week his parents took him to an East End
Chinese restaurant, and there it appeared on paper: purple walls,
cyclamen pink background peopled by black-pigtailed Chinamen
and with decorations of his vague transcription of Chinese letters.
Even when the class went to look at the red brick Victorian
chapel in the neighbourhood and several of them made delicate,
careful studies of its precise brickwork and its sombre smoky
colours, Bobby's version was a slap-dash haze of red and gold

200

PHYLLIS'S PROGRESS

looking like a Baroque cathedral. An earnest teacher who insisted
on Bobby's drawing from observation and practising careful skills
would have taken away from him what was perhaps his only
protection in a harsh world through which he, physically delicate,
emotionally vulnerable, must move his own transfigured version
of it.

While for young children and the occasional Bobby, phantasy
is an important way of exploring the world and of trying out and
combining ideas without the responsibilities of c reaF action,
adolescents must bring their phantasies into some relationship
with reality. This will not be a steady progress but one which
veers, sometimes wildly, between one and the other. With wise
teaching in the arts, they have the opportunity to come to terms
with experience, as Phyllis modified her phantasy portrait to
something nearer reality and grew in the process of doing so.

R.L. P 201

APPENDIX II

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE ARTS OF EARLY
MANKIND RELEVANT TO THIS STUDY

WHEN this book was written, Johannes Maringer's The Gods of
Prehistoric Man 1 had not been translated into English so that its
information on recent finds was not available to me. In this, a brief
and necessarily superficial summary of the chronology of various
early forms of European religion and art which may be known to
the reader, I am indebted to that book from which the quoted
passages are taken. Maringer stresses that our knowledge of these
remote ages is very incomplete.

The earliest traces of religion we have are those of the hunters
of the last great inter-glacial period, and these are preserved only
because they occur in caves over 8,000 feet up in the Alps acces-
sible in these distant short summers but later cut off for perhaps
fifty thousand years by the descending ice cap. The undamaged
head and long bones of the captured cave bears, which they
climbed so far to hunt, were preserved sometimes in a stone
coffer in the bare recesses of the cave and the brain and the
marrow seem to have been an offering to a 'divine dispenser of
good fortune*. The deliberate placing of these bones in relation
to one another may be a first feeling towards human art in
'arrangement' and 'composition'. Present-day circum-polar peoples
practise a similar rite and 'it is always bound up with the concept
and veneration of a supreme being '.

This may have been only one facet of the religion of these
inter-glacial people but no traces have been found yet of other
religious practices.

The hunters of the upper Paleolithic period relied on reindeer;
and peoples of east Europe and Northern Asia submerged young
does as offerings in lakes or pools, which points to a belief in

1 English translation 1960 published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc., New
York.

202

THE ARTS OF EARLY MANKIND

a deity in or of the earth. Others whose principal prey was the
bear seem to have used a ceremonial killing which shows a
religious awe, and this bear cult has survived in Northern Asia to
the present day.

However, most of the hunters who moved into Europe during
this period brought magic practices from other ancient cultures
but which flowered into Western European ice-age art. Animals
were the staff of life and the hunters and hunted belonged, as it
were, together. In imitating the animals (by assuming animal
masks, skins and mimic dancing) the hunter, but particularly the
shaman or magician, believed that he could have power over the
animals. Sculptured animal forms, particularly the bear, were
obviously covered with the actual head and skin of the animal for
ceremonies, and cave rites would take place round this effigy.
Above all, the walls of deep recesses of the caves often reached
by the labyrinthine windings of 'conditional entry* were decor-
ated with painted and scratched representations of the beasts, of
magicians performing rites and of pregnant women. 'It would
seem that the maturity and initiation rites of the tribes' youthful
members were conducted in some of these deep caverns.' Maringer
goes on: 'Judging by the frequent occurrence of works of a sexual
character, magic must have played a particularly important part
in the sphere of procreation; these works of art were no mere
product of eroticism, but rather the expression of a far more
fundamental aspiration human fertility. . . . Magic was not the
sole determinant of ice-age Man's outlook. ... It is quite possible
that most of the late ice-age hunters' ritual practices which are
referred to as "magical" were in fact like those of most primitive
hunting peoples today genuinely religious/

It is during this last ice-age that the mother-goddess figurines
are first found and they are specially prevalent during the Aurig-
nacian (earliest period of the late Paleolithic age) whereas the
animal paintings on cave walls reach their peak during the
Magdalenian period (the latest period of the late Paleolithic).

During the succeeding Mesolithic and Neolithic ages, after the
ice had retreated for the last time, hunters' practices were pre-
served only in the extreme north and very similar practices exist
today in the arctic territories. Among the farming peoples further
south the cult of the mother-goddess can be traced without break
and is reinforced, especially in South-Eastern Europe, by ideas

203

APPENDIX II

about her complex nature from the Near East and Egypt. 'Every
Danubian peasant hut must have held its little image of the god-
dess which the family would piously adore and before which it
would place offerings of food/ Her last great stronghold was in
Malta where her great temples are still extant. In Neolithic times
her function as goddess of Death (and rebirth?) is stressed by her
association with tombs and this is the great age of dolmen tombs
and menhirs. The menhirs, single standing stones, were often
carved with signs, one even representing a mother and child, and
appear to have been thought of as a resting-place for the soul of
the dead person underneath when it emerged in bird form from
the grave. The cave-like dolmens (post-and-lintel hollow con-
structions heaped over with earth) and menhirs (single upright
stones) may have some sexual analogy.

As the bronze-age developed, the cult of the Sun gained
strength and the cthonic cult of the earth, caves and moon-
mother waned, but, though there are objections, Hatto has sug-
gested an interpretation of Stonehenge which links the two.
Stonehenge, the greatest of the European monuments extending
over parts of both periods, was built in three phases: the first by
Neolithic peoples making ditch and ramparts enclosing a great
block; the second by beaker folk erecting the famous blue stones
brought from a great distance; the third by Bronze age peoples
erecting five great trilithons in a horseshoe shape open towards
the sunrise at midwinter.

Hatto suggests that the concentric arrangement of stones repre-
sents the position of male and female dancers in a dance which
was part of the fertility ritual. Even the orientation of the opening
of the horseshoe towards the point on the horizon where the sun
rises at the midwinter solstice was related to this ritual; the
interior of the horseshoe was a symbolic womb into which the
rays of the sun penetrated.

Certainly many dances and children's games today 'Here we
go gathering Nuts in May* and c The Grand Old Duke of York*
seem to be faint echoes of immemorial rituals.

204

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANY BOOK such as this, to which half of what one has ever read has
indirectly contributed, defies the making of a complete bibliography,
and many sources have doubtless gone unrecorded. What I have tried
to do is to draw up brief lists of books on various aspects which both
have contributed and which might be useful to readers unfamiliar with
that field. Those with asterisks were found too late to use in the study.

GENERAL

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HARDING, R. The Anatomy of Inspiration. HefFer. Cambridge. 1948.
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1947-

The Nature of Creative Activity. Kegan Paul. London. 1939.
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MUMFORD, LEWIS. Art and Technics. O.U.P. London. 1952.
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206

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INTERLUDE ON GARDENS
BACON, FRANCIS. EsSOJS.

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SYMBOLISM

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KLEE, PAUL. The Thinking Eye. Lund Humphries. London. 1961.

KNIGHT, WILSON. The Starlit Dome. O.U.P. London. 1941.
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KOCH, RUDOLF. The Book of Signs. Dover Publications. New York.

KOFFKA, KURT. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. Routledge & Kegan
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WHITEHEAD, A. N. Religion in the Making. C.U.P. London. 1926.
WITTACH, A. Signs and Symbols. London. 1924.
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LABYRINTHS

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BRIFFAULT. The Mothers. Allen & Unwin. London. 1927.
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Magic, Craftsmanship and Science. University Press. Liverpool. 1950.
New Light on the Most Ancient East. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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CRAWFORD, o. G. The Eye Goddess. Phoenix House. London. 1960.
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KERENYI, c. The Gods of the Greeks. Thames & Hudson. London. 1951.
KNIGHT, JACKSON. Cumaean Gates. Blackwell. London. 1936.
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MATTHEWS, w. H. Ma%es and ILabyrinths. London. 1922.
NEUMANN, E. The Great Mother. Routledge & Kegan Paul. London. 1960.
NILLSON, p. M. The Minoan-Mycenean Religion. London. 1927.
PRITCHARD, j. 'Palestinian Goddess Figurines' in American Journal

of Oriental Studies. Vol. 24.
SCHLIEMANN, H. Mycenae. London. 1878.
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BULLOUGH, E. (in British Journal of "Psychology Vol. 2). Distance as an

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GRABAR, ANDRi. Byzantine Painting. Skira. Geneva. 1953.
HAUSER, ARNOLD. Social History of Art. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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KNIGHT, WILSON. The Starlit Dome. London. 1941.
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210

INDEX

Absorption, 90
Achilles, 112, 129
Act of creation,
Active participation, 39
Adolescence, 86
Adolescents, 153, 162, 166
Adonis, 192

Aeneas, 54, 124, 127, 188
Aeneid, 112, 128
Agriculture, 67
Altar table, 132
Annunciation, 74
Anticipation, 106
Aphrodite, 46
Apollo, 46
Appreciation, xxiii
Approved school, 41
Apulems, 131
Arab, 70, 71, 76
Archetypal symbols, 193
Archetypal themes, 133
Archetypes, 83
Arezzo, xviii
Ariadne, 112, 121, 123
Art and experience, 107
Ashmolean, 115
Asterius, 131
Attis, 130
Auden, W. H., 44, 47

Babylon, 127

Bacon, Francis, 66

Baltic, 126

Baptism, 46

Beauvoir, Simone de, 19, 95

Bee hive, 104
Benedictines, 73
Bennet, J., 88
Berenson, 85, 195
Blindfold, 169
Bodkin, Maude, 83
Body images, 170
Bridegroom, 131
Briflfault, R., 16, 117
British Museum, 117
Bronze age voyagers, 126
Browne, Sir Thomas, 64
Bruegel, 46, 72
Bulls, 156, 165
Byzantine art, 29, 157
Byzantine painting, 92

Candle, 49
Carson, Rachel, 45
Carthusians, 73

Cave, 27, 39, 55, 128, 155, 203
Cave bears, 202
Celtic interlacing, 125
Cezanne, 196
Chaos, 87, 184, 185
Charon, 64
Chichester, xviii
Cizek, xviii

Clark, Sir Kenneth, 77, 92
Clay, Chapters i, 2, 3; 168, 186
Cliche, 107
Clothes, 103

Coal-mine, Chapter 9; 184
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 47, 5 1,
56, 83, 129

211

INDEX

Commercial art, xx
Communication, 185
Composition, 38, 155
Concentration, 91
Conditional entry, 128, 188
Conrad, Joseph, 47
Contact with a material, 169
Cook, Caldwell, xx
Counter-revolution, xx
Courts of Love, 73
Cradle, 58
Creating, 107
Creative work, 134
Cretan labyrinth, 125
Crete, 119, 124
Criticism, 32
Crusader, 72

Cruttwell, R. W,, 123, 132
Cyclades, 114
Cycle, xxii

Daedalus, 46, 112, 188, 189

Dame a la Licorne, 72, 77, 78

Dance, 15

Dante, 189, 193

Davie, Alan, 90

Delos, 46, 124, 130

Delphi, 51

Demeter, 119

Desert, 47, 192

Dewey, John, xx

Dido, 54

Dikte, 121

Discipline of art, 185

Dolmen, 204

Donne, John, 189

Drama, 15

Draw, 1 06

Dromenon, 131

Duckling, 161

Education, 193

Ego, discriminating, 85, 86, 166

Egyptian, 129

Eleusis, 130, 194

Elijah, 55

Eliot, T. S., 188, 191, 194

Emotion, xxii, 160

Etruscan, 129

Evans, 118, 124

Expression, xxiii

Family group, 20

Feather, 101

Feeling, 107

Fertility cults, 132

Fertility ritual, 204

Fiddle figures, 1 14

Figurines, 117

Fire, 192

Fish, 159

'Fixing' of an experience, 26

Florence, 63

Fool, 1 86

Forest, 42

Form, 166, 173, 174

Forms, 32, 89, 183

Fountain, 77

Fra Angelico, 68, 74

Froebel, Friedrich, xx

Trontality', 156 et seq. y 164

Frost, Robert, 183

Fulfilment, 193

'Garden carpets', 71
Garden of Hesperides, 76
Garden of love, 73
Garden of Yima, 76
Gardens, 88
Giacometti, 183
Gilgamesh, 95, 128
Goddess, Great, 118
Goddess, Moon, 122
Goddess, Mother, 113, 129, 131
Goddess, Mother-Daughter, 194
Goddess of Death, 103, 122, 204
Goddess of Love, 103
Goddess, Snake, 119

212

Golden Ass, 131
Grail, 132

Graves, Robert, 124
Gray, Basil, 69
Grayling butterfly, 162
Grebes, 163
Greek drama, 17
Greek inheritance, 120
Greek key, 123
Group- work, 98
Guernsey, 113

Haefifner, P., 43

Haptic, 17

Harbour, 42, 51, 156

Hatto, 204

Hauser, 157

Herbert, George, 81

Herodotus, 124

Hitchens, Ivon, 90

Hokusai, 49

Holy Marriage, 131

Homer, 46, 98, 112, 120

Homosexual, 41

Hopkins, Gerard Manley,

195

Horn, 122
Hours, 68
Housewife, 95
Hyppolytus, 127

Icarus, 1 88
Idea, ^173 ^
Identification, 85
Ikon, 158
Iliad, 112
Image, 51, 168
Imagination, 56, Chapter n
Imprinting, 161
Industrial, 41

Industrial environment, 43
Initiation, 130, 132, 133
Initiation rites, 203

INDEX

Innate releasing mechanism, 162

Insecurity, xxi

Involvement, xxiii, 32

Isis, 119

Ishtar, 95, 103

lulus, 124, 127

Jerusalem, 47
Journey-of-the-dead, 128
Jung, Carl Gustav, 77, 83, 194

Kafka, Franz, 188

Keats, John, 50, 87, 183, 195

Kinaesthetic, 13, 14, 170

Klee, Paul, 76

Knight, Jackson, 129

Knight, Wilson, 94, 186

Knossos, 51, 112, 120

Knot, 123

Kore, 54, 131

Krishna, 68

Laban, Rudolf, 29, 165
1 8 8, Labyrinth, Interlude in, 132,

Chapter 12
Latency, 43
Layard, John, 123
Lazarus, xviii

Levy, Gertrude, 118, 123, 131
Lighthouses, 5
Litany of Loreto, 74
Lorenz, Konrad, 154, 159, 161
Love, 191

Lowenfeld, Viktor, xviii
Lunar cycle, 46
Lustralpits, 130

Madonna, 32, 73 et seq., 155; see

also Virgin

Madonna of the Rosegarden, 74
Magic, 67, 129
Maiden Castle, 128

213

INDEX

Make-up, 103

Malekula, 123

Malta, 204

Margaret's rosegarden, 52, 65, 76,

in, 127, 134, 183
Martini, Simone, 75
Mary, 190

Masculine civilisation, 114
Masters, xxiii
Material, 182
Matriarchy, 16
Maze dance, 124
Medium, Chapter n
Melville,, Herman, 47
Menhirs, 204
Milner, Marion, 91, 185
Minos, 46, 189
Minotaur, 121, 128
Mixed staffs, 103
Modelling, 1 69 et seq.
Moments of creation, 187
Monastic gardens, 68
Mood, 1 66, 183
Moore, Henry, 8, 17, 21, 50, 174,

183

Mother, 156
Mother and child, 22
Mother-goddess figurines, 203
Motif, 89
Movement, 15, 90
Mumford, Lewis, 81
Mummified image, 30
Murray, Gilbert, 83
Mycene, 120
Mysteries, 131
Mystic Meal, 130

Nash, Paul, 106
Nature of material, 101
Necklace, 102, 117
Negative capability, 87
Nicolette, 72
Nile, 67
Nun, 100

Obsessional subject, 31, 51
Odyssey ', 46, 98, 120
Order, 87
Osiris, 124

Palace of Minos, 118, 124

Palaeolithic, 55, 118, 202

Paradise, 66

Paradise garden, 73, 191

Participation, 132

Patriarchy, 16

Pattern, 67

Peacock, 77

Persephone, 165

Persian, 68

Personality, 90

Pestalozzi, xx

Pets, 15

Phantasy, 56, 98, 102, 106

Pillar shapes, 172

Pisano, Niccolo, 74

Plato, 56

Pliny, 66

Poet, 1 06

Pollock, Jackson, 90

Pomet, 67

Pompeii, 68, 131

Pot-pourri, 66

Potter, 112

Princess, 102

Prospero, 56

Psychiatrists, 180

Psycho-analysis, 91

Questor, 132

Railway station, 42
Raphael, 75
Read, Herbert, 131
Rebirth, 130 ef seq. y 195
Re-enactment, 152
Reisman, David, 86
Release, 184

INDEX

Rembrandt, 68
Renunciations, 193
Richardson, Marion, xix
Ritual, 152, 159, 164, 165
Ritual re-enactment, 164
Romanesque art, xviii
Romaunt de la Rose, 72, 74
Rosegarden, Interlude on gardens

Chapter 12
Rose-window, 132
Rousseau, xx

Sacred marriage, 121, 129

Sanctuary, 70, 123

Sassoon, Siegfried, 16

Satisfaction, 184

Schema, xvii, 81

Scribbles, xvii

Sea, 20

Sensation, 51

Sensory experience, 93

Shaman, 203

Sheba, 70

Shell, 171, 189

Shorn lock, 127

Sibyl, 54, 113

Sicily, 71

Sign stimuli, 160, 161

Simmons, Kenneth, 163

Sketchbooks, 42

Song of songs, 77

Spain, 71

Spencer, Stanley, 105, 106, 186

Spenser, 72

Spider, 104

Spiritual aspiration, 107

Spiritual union, 186

Stephano da Verona, 73

Stickleback, 161

Still, Colin, 133

Stonehenge, 204

Structure, 177

Studio, 30

Study, xxH

Subject set, 105

Sung pottery, 22

Super-normal sign stimuli, 162

Swans, 173

Sykes, Christopher, 70

Symbol, 76, Chapter 6, 103

Chapter 10, 185, 193
Symbols of adolescence, 193

Tactile, 14, 170

Tangible evidence, 107

Teacher, 87, 91, 134

Technique, xxi, 179

Temenos, 70, 76

Tempest, 56

Tension, 180

Themes, 35, 37, 82, 84, 88, 183

Theseus, 120, 122, 123, 127, 130

Tides, 44

Time, 105

Tinbergen, Niko, 161, 162

Tir-na-n'Og, 76

Tradition, 89, 94

Treasure trove, 5 9

Tree, 42, 123

Troy, 126, 129

'Troy-games', 124

*Troy-towns', 125

Twentieth-century subjects, 87

Universal myth, 133
Universal shapes, 174

Virgil, 66

Virgin, 74; see also Madonna,

Mary
Visual image, xvii, xviii, 81, 158

Walls in drawings, 5 1
Water, 48, 71
Waterfalls, 48
Week, 46
Weston, Jessie, 132

215

INDEX

Wholeness, 195 Yeats, W. B., 168, 186

Witch, 102
Wood, 42, 156 Zeus, 46, 121

Wreaths, 67 Zisa > 7*

216

THE AUTHOR

Miss Robertson was educated at Edin-
burgh College of Art and was awarded an
Andrew Grant Fellowship. She was on
the founder staff of Bretton Hall in York-
shire, leaving when awarded the Senior
Research Fellowship in Education at the
University of Leeds. Because she feels
strongly that the training of art students
has been too exclusively in art, Miss
Robertson turned to lecturing on educa-
tion. She is now Potter, and Lecturer
in Education, at Goldsmiths' College,
London.

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